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ROBERT BROWNING 



BY 

C. H. HERFORD 

Professor of English Literature in the 
University of Manchester 



NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 

1905 



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Copyright^ igo^ 
By Dodd, Mead and Company 



Published^ March, igos 



ro THE 
REV, F, E. MILLSON 

DEAR OLD FRIEND, 

A generation has passed since the 
day wheUf in your study at Brackenbed Grange, your 
reading of ^^ Ben Ezra,'^ the tones of which still vibrate 
in my memory, first introduced me to the poetry of Robert 
Browning. He was then fust entering upon his wider 
fame. You had for years been one not inerely of the 
few who recognised him, but of those, yet fewer, who 
proclaimed him. The standpoint of the following pages 
is not, I think, very remote from your oivn ; conversa- 
tions with you have, in any case, done something to define 
it. You see, then, that your share of responsibility for 
them is, on all counts, considerable, and you must not 
refuse to allow me to associate them with a nafne which 
the old Rabbi's great heartening cry : *' Strive, and hold 
cheap the strain. Learn, nor account the pang. Dare, 
never grudge the throe, ' ' summons spontaneously to many 
other lips than mine. To some it is brought yet closer 
by his calm retrospect through sorrow. 



PREFACE 

Browning is confessedly a difficult poet, and his 
difficulty is by no means all of the kind which op- 
poses unmistakable impediments to the reader's path. 
Some of it is of the more insidious kind, which may 
coexist with a delightful persuasion that the way is 
absolutely clear, and Browning's " obscurity " an in- 
vention of the invertebrate. The problems presented 
by his writing are merely tough, and will always yield 
to intelligent and patient scrutiny. But the problems 
presented by his mind are elusive, and it would be hard 
to resist the cogency of his interpreters, if it were not 
for their number. The rapid succession of acute and 
notable studies of Browning put forth during the last 
three or four years makes it even more apparent than 
it was before that the last word on Browning has not 
yet been said, even in that very qualified sense in 
which the last word about any poet, or any poetry, 
can ever be said at all. The present volume, in any 
case, does not aspire to say it. But it is not perhaps 
necessary to apologise for adding, under these con- 
ditions, another to the list. From most of the recent 
studies I have learned something ; but this book has 



Vlll PREFACE 

its roots in a somewhat earlier time, and may perhaps 
be described as an attempt to work out, in the detail 
of Browning's life and poetry, from a more definitely 
literary standpoint and without Hegelian preposses- 
sions, a view of his genius not unlike that set forth 
with so much eloquence and penetration, in his well- 
known volume, by Professor Henry Jones. The nar- 
rative of Browning's life, in the earlier chapters, 
makes no pretence to biographical completeness. An 
immense mass of detail and anecdote bearing upon 
him is now available and within easy reach. I have 
attempted to sift out from this picturesque loose drift 
the really salient and relevant material. Much do- 
mestic incident, over which the brush would fain 
linger, will be missed ; on the other hand, the great 
central epoch of Browning's poetic life, from 1846 
to 1869, has been treated, deliberately, on what may 
appear an inordinately generous scale. Some amount 
of overlapping and repetition, it may be added, in the 
analytical chapters the plan of the book rendered it 
impossible wholly to avoid. 

I am indebted to a friend, who wishes to be name- 
less, for reading the proofs, with results extremely 
beneficial to the book. 

University of Manchester, 
January f igoj. 



CONTENTS 



PREFACE 



Vll 



I. 

II. 

III. 



PART I 
BROWNING'S LIFE AND WORK 

EARLY LIFE. PARACELSUS . 

ENLARGING HORIZONS. SORDELLO 

MATURING METHODS. DRAMAS AND DRA- 
MATIC LYRICS 

Introduction. 

I. Dramas. From Strafford to Pippa Passes 

II. From the Blot in the 'Scutcheon to Luria 
III. The early Dramatic Lyrics and Romances 

IV. WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY. MEN AND 
WOMEN 
I. January 1845 ^° September 1846 

II. Society and Friendships . 

III. Politics .... 

IV. Poems of Nature . . • 
V. Poems of Art 

VI. Poems of Religion 
VII. Poems of Love 
V. LONDON. DRAMATIS PERSONAL 
VL THE RING AND THE BOOK. 
VII. AFTERMATH 
VIII. THE LAST DECADE 



3 

38 
43 
^5 



74 
74 
83 

87 
90 

96 

109 

131 

147 
168 
186 
218 



CONTENTS 

PART II 
BROWNING'S MIND AND ART 

IX. THE POET 235 

I. Divergent psychical tendencies of Browning — 

" romantic " temperament, " realist " senses — 
blending of their donnees in his imaginative 
activity — shifting complexion of " finite " and 
" infinite " . . . . . 235 

II. His " realism." Plasticity, acuteness, and verac- 

ity of intellect and senses . . . 237 

III. But his realism qualified by energetic individual 

preference along certain well-defined lines . 243 

IV. Joy in Light and Colour . . . 244 
V. Joy in Form. Love of abruptness, of intricacy ; 

clefts and spikes .... 247 

VI. Joy in Power. Violence in imagery and descrip- 
tion; in sounds; in words. Grotesqueness. 
Intensity. Catastrophic action. The preg- 
nant moment. ..... 254 

VII. Joy in Soul. i. Limited in Browning on the 
side of simple human nature ; of the family ; 
of the civic community ; of myth and symbol. 264 
VIII. Joy in Sold. 2. Supported by Joy in Light and 
Colour ; in Form ; in Power. 3. Extended to 
{a) sub-human Nature, {b) the inanimate 
products of Art ; Relation of Browning's poe- 
try to his interpretation of life . . 269 

X. THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE . . 283 

I. Approximation of God, Man, Nature in the 
thought of the early nineteenth century ; how 
far reflected in the thought of Browning . 283 

II. Antagonistic elements of Browning's intellect; 

resulting fluctuations of his thought. Two 
conceptions of Reality. Ambiguous treat- 
ment of « Matter " ; of Time . . 286 

III. Conflicting tendencies in his conception of God, 290 



CONTENTS Xi 

IV. Conflicting tendencies in his treatment of Knowl- 

„"^Se 293 

V. Proximate solution of these antagonisms in the 

conception of Love . . . -291: 

VI. Final estimate of Browning's relation to the pro- 
gressive and conservative movements of his 
age • . . . . .296 

INDEX 30^ 



PART I 
BROWNING'S LIFE AND WORK 



£t Si) O^lov 6 voo<$ Ttpbi Tov avOpcDTTov, A:al 6 Rata roorov ^ia<s 
delo^ npo^ Tov dvOpatTTo^ov jSiov. — ArisT., £f/i. JV. x. 8. 

" N^ creator ne creatura mai," 
Cominci6 ei, " figliuol, fu senza amore." 

— Dante, J^ur^^. xvii. 91. 



BROWNING 

CHAPTER I 

EARLY LIFE. PARACELSUS 

The Boy sprang up . . . and ran, 

Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought. 

— A Death in the Desert. 

Dass ich erkenne, was die Welt 
Im Innersten zusammenhalt. 

— Faust. 

Judged by his cosmopolitan sympathies and his en- 
cyclopaedic knowledge, by the scenery and the per- 
sons among whom his poetry habitually moves, Brown- 
ing was one of the least insular of English poets. But 
he was also, of them all, one of the most obviously and 
unmistakably English. Tennyson, the poetic mouth- 
piece of a rather specific and exclusive Anglo-Saxon- 
dom, belonged by his Vergilian instincts of style to 
that main current of European poetry which finds re- 
sponse and recognition among cultivated persons of all 
nationalities ; and he enjoyed a European distinction 
not attained by any other English poet since Byron. 
Browning, on the contrary, with his long and brilliant 
gallery of European creations. Browning, who claimed 
Italy as his " university," remains, as a poet, all but 
unknown even in Italy, and all but non-existent for 

3 



BROWNING 



the rest of the civilised world beyond the Channel. 
His cosmopolitan sympathies worked through the 
medium of a singularly individual intellect ; and the 
detaching and isolating effect which pronounced in- 
dividuality of thinking usually produces, even in a 
genial temperament, was heightened in his case by a 
robust indifference to conventions of all kinds, and 
not least to those which make genius easily intelligi- 
ble to the plain man. 

What is known of Browning's descent makes these 
contrasts in some degree intelligible. An old strain 
of Wessex squires or yeomen, dimly discernible in the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, issued, about the 
middle of the eighteenth, in the first distinct person- 
ality among the poet's forebears, his grandfather, who 
also bore the name Robert. He was a robust, hard- 
headed, energetic, pushing man of business and the 
world, who made his way from a clerkship to an im- 
portant and responsible post in the Bank of England, 
and settled accounts with religion and with literature 
in a right English way, by reading the Bible and " Tom 
Jones " through every year, and very little else. More 
problematical and elusive is the figure of his first wife, 
Margaret Tittle, with whom, to judge from the char- 
acter of her eldest son, literary and artistic sensibility 
first mingled in the hard practical Browning stock. 
In this second Robert Browning, indeed, the some- 
what brutal and grasping egotism of the father gave 
place to a cultured humanity of almost feminine ten- 
derness and charm. All his life long he was passion- 
ately devoted to literature, to art, to children. He 



EARLY LIFE 



collected rare books and prints with avidity, but was 
no less generous in giving them away. Indifferent to 
money, he hated to see a scrap of paper wasted. He 
had a neat touch in epigrams, and a boyish delight in 
grotesque rhymes. But there was no lack of grit in 
this accomplished, fresh-minded, and lovable man. 
He had the tough fibre of his race ; only it was the 
wrongs of others that called out its tenacity, not his 
own. While holding an appointment on his mother's 
West Indian estate, he braved the fierce resentment 
of the whole colony by teaching a negro-boy to read ; 
and finally incurred disinheritance rather than draw a 
livelihood from slave-labour. This Shelleyan act in- 
volved for him the resignation of his intellectual and 
artistic ambitions ; and with the docility characteristic 
of him, where only his own interests were concerned, 
he forthwith entered the fairly well-paid but unexcit- 
ing service of the Bank. 

In 1811 he married, and on May 7 of the follow- 
ing year his eldest son, Robert, was born. His wife 
was the daughter of a German shipowner, William 
Wiedemann, who had settled and married at Dundee. 
Wiedemann is said to have been an accomplished 
p draughtsman and musician, and his daughter, without 
j herself sharing these gifts, probably passed them on to 
1 her son. Whether she also communicated from her 
\ Scottish and German ancestry the " metaphysical " 
proclivities currently ascribed to him, is a hypothesis 
absolutely in the air.^ What is clear is that she was 

' A similar but more groundless suggestion, that the author of 
Holy-cross Day and Rabbi ben Ezra probably had Jewish blood in 



BROWNING 



herself intellectually simple and of few ideas, but rich 
in the temperament, at once nervous and spiritual, 
which when present in the mother so often becomes 
genius in the son. " She was a divine woman," such 
was her son*s brief sufficing tribute. Physically he 
seems to have closely resembled her,^ and they were 
bound together by a peculiarly passionate love from 
first to last. 

The home in Camberwell into which the boy 
Robert was born reflected the serene, harmonious, 
self-contented character of his parents. Friends rarely 
disturbed the even tenor of its ways, and the storms of 
politics seem to have intruded as faintly into this su- 
burban seclusion as the roar of London. Books, busi- 
ness, and religion provided a framework of decorous 
routine within which these kindly and beautiful souls 
moved with entire content. Well-to-do Camberwell 
perhaps contained few homes so pure and refined; 
but it must have held many in which the life-blood of 
political and social interests throbbed more vigorously, 
and where thought and conversation were in closer 

his veins, can only be described as an impertinence — not to Brown- 
ing but to the Jewish race. As if to feel the spiritual genius of 
Hebraism and to be moved by the pathos of Hebraic fate were an 
eccentricity only to be accounted for by the bias of kin ! It is sig- 
nificant that his demonstrable share of German blood left him rather 
conspicuously impervious to the literary — and more especially to 
the " metaphysical " — products of the German mind. 

1 Browning himself reports the exclamation of the family doctor 
when trying to diagnose an attack of his : " Why, has anybody to 
search far for a cause of whatever nervous disorder you may suffer 
from, when there sits your mother — whom you so absolutely re- 
semble ! " {Letters to E. B. B., ii. 456). 



EARLY LIFE 



touch with the intellectual life of the capital and the 
larger movements of the time. Nothing in Brown- 
ing's boyhood tended to open his imagination to the 
sense of citizenship and nationality which the imperial 
pageants and ceremonies of Frankfurt so early kindled 
in the child Goethe. But within the limits imposed 
by this quiet home young Robert soon began to dis- 
play a vigour and enterprise which tried all its re- 
sources. " He clamoured for occupation from the 
moment he could speak," and " something to do " 
meant above all some living thing to be caught for 
him to play with. The gift of an animal was found 
a valuable aid to negotiations with the young despot j 
when medicine was to be taken, he would name " a 
speckled frog " as the price of his compliance, and 
presently his mother would be seen hovering hither 
and thither among the stravvberry-beds. A quaint 
menagerie was gradually assembled : owls and mon- 
keys, magpies and hedgehogs, an eagle and snakes. 
Boy-collectors are often cruel j but Robert showed 
from the first an anxious tenderness and an eager care 
for life : we hear of a hurt cat brought home to be 
nursed, of lady-birds picked up in the depths of winter 
and preserved with wondering delight at their survival. 
Even in stories the death of animals moved him to 
bitter tears. He was equally quick at books, and 
soon outdistanced his companions at the elementary 
schools which he attended up to his fourteenth year. 
Near at hand, too, was the Dulwich Gallery, — " a 
green half-hour's walk across the fields," — a beloved 
haunt of his childhood, to which he never ceased to 



8 BROWNING 

be grateful. ^ But his father's overflowing library and 
portfolios played the chief part in his early develop- 
ment. He read voraciously, and apparently without 
restraint or control. The letters of Junius and of 
Horace Walpole were familiar to him " in boyhood/' 
we are assured with provoking indefiniteness by Mrs. 
Orr ; as well as " all the works of Voltaire." Most 
to his mind, however, was the rich sinewy English 
and athletic fancy of the seventeenth century Fan- 
tastic Quarles ; a preference which foreshadowed his 
later delight in the great master of the Fantastic 
school, and of all who care for close-knit intellect in 
poetry, John Donne. 

Curiously enough, it was some fragments of the 
grandiose but shadowy Ossian which first stirred the 
imitative impulse in this poet of trenchant and clear- 
cut form. " The first composition I ever was guilty 
of," he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett (Aug. 25, 1846), 
" was something in imitation of Ossian, whom I had 
not read, but conceived through two or three scraps 
in other books." And long afterwards Ossian was 
" the first book I ever bought in my life " (ib.). These 
'^ imitations " were apparently in verse, and in rhyme ; 
and Browning's bent and faculty for both was very 
early pronounced. " I never can recollect not writ- 
ing rhymes ; . . . but I knew they were nonsense 
even then." And a well-known anecdote of his in- 
fancy describes his exhibition of a lively sense of 
metre in verses which he recited with emphatic ac- 
companiments upon the edge of the dining-room table 

1 To E. B. B., March 3, 1846. 



EARLY LIFE 9 

before he was tall enough to look over it. The crowd- 
ing thoughts of his maturity had not yet supervened to 
prevent the abundant music that he " had in him ** 
from ^' getting out." It is not surprising that a boy of 
these proclivities was captivated by the stormy swing 
and sweep of Byron ; nor that he should have caught 
also something of his " splendour of language," and 
even, a little later, a reflection, respectable and suburban 
enough, of his rebellious Titanism. The less so, that 
in Robert's eleventh or twelfth year Byron, the head 
of the Satanic school, had become the heroic cham- 
pion of Greek liberation, and was probably spoken of 
with honour in the home of the large-hearted banker 
who had in his day suffered so much for the sake of 
the unemancipated slave. In later years Browning 
was accustomed to deliver himself of breezy sarcasms 
at the expense of the " flat-fish " who declaimed so 
eloquently about the " deep and dark blue ocean." 
But it is easy to see that this genial chafF covered a 
real admiration, — the tribute of one abounding nature 
to another, which even years and the philosophic mind 
did not seriously abate. " I always retained my first 
feeling for Byron in many respects," he wrote in a 
significant letter to Miss Barrett in 1846. "... I 
would at any time have gone to Finchley to see a curl 
of his hair or one of his gloves, I am sure — while 
Heaven knows that I could not get up enthusiasm 
enough to cross the room if at the other end of it all 
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were condensed 
into the little china bottle yonder."^ It was thus no 
1 To £. B. B., Aug. 22, 1846. 



10 BROWNING 

mere freak of juvenile taste that took shape in these 
early Byronic poems. He entitled them, with the 
lofty modesty of boyish authorship, Incondita^ and his 
parents sought to publish them. No publisher could 
be found ; but they won the attention of a notable 
critic, W. J. Fox, who feared too much splendour and 
too little thought in the young poet, but kept his eye 
on him nevertheless. 

Two years later the boy of fourteen caught the 
accents of another poetic voice, destined to touch the 
sources of music and passion in him with far more 
intimate power. His casual discovery, on a book-stall, 
of " Mr. Shelley's Atheistical poem " seems to have 
for the first time made known to him even the name 
of the poet who had died in Italy four years before. 
Something of Shelley's story seems to have been 
known to his parents. It gives us a measure of the 
indulgent sympathy and religious tolerance which pre- 
vailed in this Evangelical home, that the parents 
should have unhesitatingly supplied the boy of four- 
teen, at some cost of time and trouble, with all the 
accessible writings of the " atheistical " poet, and with 
those of his presumably like-minded friend Keats as 
well. He fell instantly under the spell of both. 
Whatever he may have known before of ancient or 
modern literature, the full splendour of romantic 
poetry here broke upon him for the first time. Im- 
mature as he was, he already responded instinctively 
to the call of the spirits most intimately akin to his 
own. Byron's stormy power thrilled and delighted 
him ; but it was too poor in spiritual elements, too 



EARLY LIFE II 

negative, self-centred, and destructive to stir the deeper 
sources of Browning's poetry. In Keats and in Shel- 
ley he found poetic energies not less glowing and in- 
tense, bent upon making palpable to eye and ear visions 
of beauty which, with less of superficial realism, were 
fed by far more exquisite and penetrating senses, and 
attached by more and subtler filaments to the truth of 
things. Beyond question this was the decisive literary 
experience of Browning's early years. Probably it 
had a chief part in making the poet's career his fixed 
ideal, and ultimately, with his father's willing consent, 
his definite choice. ' What we know of his inner and 
outer life during the important years which turned the 
boy into the man is slight and baffling enough. The 
fiery spirit of poetry can rarely have worked out its 
way with so little disturbance to the frame. Minute 
scrutiny has disclosed traits of unrest and revolt; he 
professed " atheism " and practised vegetarianism, be- 
trayed at times the aggressive arrogance of an able 
youth, and gave his devoted and tender parents mo- 
ments of very superfluous concern. For with all his 
immensely vivacious play of brain, there was some- 
thing in his mental and moral nature from first to last 
stubbornly inelastic and unimpressible, that made him 
equally secure against expansion and collapse. The 
same simple tenacity of nature which kept his buoy- 
antly adventurous intellect permanently within the 
tether of a few primary convictions, kept him, in the 
region of practice and morality, within the bounds of 
a rather nice and fastidious decorum.^ Malign influ- 
ences eff^ected no lodgment in a nature so fundamen- 



12 BROWNING 

tally sound ; they might cloud and trouble imagination 
for a while, but their scope hardly extended further, 
and as they were literary in origin, so they were mainly 
literary in expression. In the meantime he was laying, 
in an unsystematic but not ineffective way, the foun- 
dations of his many-sided culture and accomplish- 
ment. We hear much of private tutors, of instruction 
in French, in music, in riding, fencing, boxing, dan- 
cing ; of casual attendance also at the Greek classes 
in University College. In all these matters he seems 
to have won more or less definite accomplishment, and 
from most of them his versatile literary talent took, at 
one time or another, an effective toll. The athletic 
musician, who composed his own songs and gloried in 
a gallop, was to make verse simulate, as hardly any 
artificer had made it before, the labyrinthine meander- 
ings of the fugue and the rhythmic swing of hoofs. 

Of all these varied aims and aspirations, of all in 
short that was going on under the surface of this 
brilliant and versatile Robert Browning of twenty, we 
have a chaotic reflection in the famous fragment Paul- 
ine, The quite peculiar animosity with which its 
author in later life regarded this single " crab " of his 
youthful tree of knowledge only adds to its interest. 
He probably resented the frank expression of passion, 
nowhere else approached in his works. Yet passion 
only agitates the surface of Pauline. Whether Paul- 
ine herself stand for an actual woman — rMiss Flower 
or another — or for the nascent spell of womanhood — 
she plays, for one who is ostensibly the heroine of the 
poem, a discouragingly minor part. No wonder she 



EARLY LIFE 



13 



felt tempted to advise the burning of so unflattering a 
record. Instead of the lyric language of love, she 
has to receive the confessions of a subtle psychologist, 
who must unlock the tumultuous story of his soul 
'' before he can sing." And these confessions are of 
a kind rare even amongst self-revelations of genius. 
Pauline's lover is a dreamer, but a dreamer of an un- 
common species. He is preoccupied with the proc- 
esses of his mind, but his mind ranges wildly over 
the universe and chafes at the limitations it is forced 
to recognise. Mill, a master, not to say a pedant, of 
introspection, recognised with amazement the " in- 
tense self-consciousness " of this poet, and self-con- 
sciousness is the key-note which persists through all its 
changing harmonies. It is the self-consciousness of 
a soul compelled by quick and eager senses and vivid 
intelligence to recognise a host of outer realities not 
itself, which it constantly strives to bring into relation 
with itself, as constantly baffled and thrown back by 
the obstinate objectivity of that outer world. A pure 
dreamer would have " contentedly lived in a nut-shell 
and imagined himself king of infinite space " ; a 
purely scientific intelligence would have applied him- 
self to the patient mastery of facts ; in the hero of 
Pauline the despotic senses and intellect of science 
and the imperious imagination of the poet appear to 
coexist and to contend, and he tosses to and fro in a 
fever of fitful effx)rts, continually frustrated, to find 
complete spiritual response and expressiveness in the 
intractable maze of being. There had indeed been 
an earlier time when the visions of old poets had 



14 BROWNING 

wholly sufficed him ; and the verses in which he re- 
calls them have almost the pellucid charm of Homer, — 

" Never morn broke clear as those 
On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea, 
The deep groves, and white temples, and wet caves." 

But growing intellect demanded something more. 
Shelley, the " Sun-treader," weaving soul and sense 
into a radiant vesture " from his poet's station between 
both," did much to sustain him ; Plato's more explicit 
and systematic idealism gave him for a while a 
stronger assurance. But disillusion broke in : " Sud- 
denly, without heart-wreck I awoke ; I said, 'twas 
beautiful, yet but a dream, and so adieu to it ! " 
Then the passionate restlessness of his nature stings 
him forth afresh. He steeps himself in the concrete 
vitality of things, lives in imagination through " all 
life where it is most alive," immerses himself in all 
that is most beautiful and intense in Nature, so ful- 
filling, it might seem, his passionate craving to " be 
all, have, see, know, taste, feel all," — yet only to feel 
that satisfaction is not here : 

« My soul saddens when it looks beyond : 
I cannot be immortal, taste all joys ; " 

only the sickness of satiety. But when all joy was 
tasted, what then ? If there was any " crowning " 
state, it could only be, thought Browning, one in 
which the soul looked up to the unattainable infinity 
of God. 

Such seem to be the outlines of the mental history 



EARLY LIFE I5 

which passes before us, brilliant and incoherent as a 
dream, in Pauline. The material, vast and many- 
sided as it is, is not fully mastered ; but there is noth- 
ing merely imitative ; it is everywhere Browning, and 
no mere disciple of Shelley or another, who is palpa- 
bly at work. The influence of Shelley seems, in- 
deed, to have been already outgrown when Pauline 
was written; Browning gloried in him and in his in- 
creasing fame, but he felt that his own aims and 
destiny were different. Rossetti, a few years later, 
took Pauline to be the work of an unconscious pre- 
Raphaelite ; and there is enough of subtle simplicity, 
of curious minuteness, in the details to justify the 
error. In the meantime many outward circumstances 
conspired to promote the " advance " which every 
line of it foretold. His old mentor of the Incondita 
days, W. J. Fox, in some sort a Browningite before 
Browning, reviewed Pauline in The Monthly Reposi- 
tory (April, 1833) with generous but discerning praise. 
This was the beginning of a warm friendship between 
the two, which ended only with Fox's death. It was 
founded upon hearty admiration on both sides, and no 
man living was better qualified to scatter the morbid 
films that clung about the expanding genius of young 
Browning than this robust and masculine critic and 
preacher. A few months later came an event of 
which we know very little, but which at least did 
much to detach him from the limited horizons of 
Camberwell. At the invitation of M. Benckhausen, 
Russian consul-general, Browning accompanied him, 
in the winter of 1833-34, on a special mission to St. 



1 6 BROWNING 

Petersburg. The journey left few apparent traces on 
his work. But he remembered the rush of the sledge 
through the forest when, half a century later, he told 
the thrilling tale of Ivan Ivanovitch. And even the 
modest intimacy with affairs of State obtainable in the 
office of a consul-general seems to have led his 
thoughts seriously to diplomacy as a career. One 
understands that to the future dissector of a Hohen- 
stiel-Schwangau and a Blougram the career might 
present attractions. It marks the seriousness of his 
ambition that he actually applied for a post in the 
Persian Embassy. This fancy of Ferishtah^ like a 
similar one of ten years later, was not gratified, but 
the bent which was thus thwarted in practical life 
disported itself freely in poetry, and the marks of the 
diplomatist in posse are pretty clearly legible in the 
subtle political webs which make up so much of the 
plots of Strafford^ King Victor^ and Sordello. 

But much sharper rebuffs than this would have 
failed to disturb the immense buoyancy of Browning's 
temperament. He was twenty-three, and in the first 
flush of conscious power. His exuberant animal 
spirits flowed out in whimsical talk ; he wrote letters 
of the gayest undergraduate insouciance to Fox, and 
articles full of extravagant jesting for The Trifier^ an 
amateur journal which received the lucubrations of his 
little circle. He enjoyed life like a boy, and shared 
its diversions like a man about town. These super- 
ficial vivacities were the slighter play of a self-con- 
sciousness which in its deeper recesses was steadily 
gathering power, richness, and assurance. His keen 



EARLY LIFE 1 7 

social instincts saved him from most of the infirmities 
of budding genius ; but the poems he contributed to 
Fox's journal during the following two years (1834-36) 
show a significant predilection for imagining the ex- 
travagances and fanaticisms of lonely self-centred 
minds. Joannes Agricola, sublime on the dizzy pin- 
nacle of his theological arrogance, looking up through 
the gorgeous roof of heaven and assured that nothing 
can stay his course to his destined abode, God's 
breast ; Porphyria's lover, the more uncanny fanatic 
who murders with a smile ; the young man who in 
his pride of power sees in the failures and mistakes of 
other men examples providentially intended for his 
guidance, — it was such subjects as these that touched 
Browning's fancy in those ardent and sanguine years. 
He probably entered with keener relish into these ex- 
travagances than his maturer wisdom approved. It is 
significant, at any rate, that when Agricola and Por- 
phyria^ s Lover were republished in The Bells and Pome- 
granates of 1842, a new title. Madhouse Cells ^ gave 
warning that their insanity was not to be attributed to 
the poet. The verses " Still ailing wind," he qualified 
in a yet more explicit fashion twenty years later, for 
they are the young man's poem which James Lee's 
wife reads " under the cliffy," and subjects to her aus- 
tere and disillusioned criticism. But they mark the 
drift of Browning of the mid-'Thirties, so far as they 
go, clearly enough. Fortunately, however, we are not 
dependent upon these slight clues. For during the 
winter months of 1834-35 he was occupied in por- 
traying a far more imposing embodiment of the young 



1 8 BROWNING 

man's pride of power, a Joannes Agricola of equally 
superb confidence and far more magnificent ideals. 
In April, 1835, Browning was able to announce to his 
good friend Fox the completion of Paracelsus, 

He owed the suggestion to another new acquaint- 
ance, whose intimacy, like that of the Russian con- 
sul-general, marks the fascination exercised by young 
Browning upon men of antecedents, race, and social 
standing widely different from his own. Count Ame- 
dee de Ripert Monclar was a French royalist and 
refugee ; he was also an enthusiastic student of history. 
Possibly he recognised an afiinity between the vaguely 
outlined dreams of Pauline's lover and those of the 
historic Paracelsus; and he may well have thought 
that the task of grappling with definite historic ma- 
terial would steady the young poet's hand. We could 
applaud the acuteness of the suggestion with more 
confidence had not the Count had an unlucky after- 
thought, which he regarded as fatal, to the effect that 
the story of Paracelsus, however otherwise adapted to 
the creator of Pauline's lover, was entirely destitute 
of a Pauline. There was no opening for love. But 
Pauline, with all her warm erotic charms and her 
sparkling French prose, was the most unsubstantial 
and perishable thing in the poem which bore her name : 
she and the spirit which begot her had vanished like a 
noisome smoke, and Browning threw himself with 
undiminished ardour upon the task of interpreting a 
career in which the sole sources of romance and of 
tragedy appeared to be the passion for knowledge and 
the arrogance of discovery. 



EARLY LIFE I9 

For it is quite clear that, whatever criticisms Brown- 
ing finally brought to bear upon Paracelsus, his atti- 
tude towards him, at no time hostile, was at the out- 
set rather that of a literary champion, vindicating a 
man of original genius from the calumnies of igno- 
rance and dulness. This view, then rather unusual, 
was a very natural one for him to take, Paracelsus 
being among the many keen interests of the elder 
Browning/ It is a strange mistake to suppose, with 
a recent very ingenious commentator, that Browning, 
eager to destroy the fallacy of intellectual pride, sin- 
gled out Paracelsus as a crucial example of the futili- 
ties of intellect. On the contrary, he filled his anno- 
tations with documentary evidences which attest not 
only the commanding scientific genius of Paracelsus, 
but the real significance of his achievements, even for 
the modern world. In the intellectual hunger of 
Paracelsus, in that " insatiable avidity of penetrating 
the secrets of nature " which his follower Bitiskius 
(approvingly quoted by Browning) ascribed to him, he 
saw a fascinating realisation of his own vague and 
chaotic " restlessness.'* Here was a spirit made up 
in truth "of an intensest life," driven hither and 
thither by the hunger for intellectual mastery of the 
universe ; and Browning, far from convicting him of 
intellectual futility, has made him actually divine the 
secret he sought, and, in one of the most splendid pas- 
sages of modern poetry, declare with his dying lips a 
faith which is no less Browning's than his own. 

> His library, as I am informed by Prof. Hall Griffin, contained 
a copy of the works of Paracelsus, doubtless that used by his son. 



20 BROWNING 

While he thus lavished his utmost power on por- 
traying the soaring genius of Paracelsus, as he con- 
ceived it, he turned impatiently away from the husk 
of popular legend by which it was half obscured. He 
shrank from no attested fact, however damaging; but 
he brushed away the accretions of folk-lore, however 
picturesque. The attendant spirit who enabled Para- 
celsus to work his marvellous cures, and his no less 
renowned Sword, were for Browning contemptible 
futilities. Yet a different way of treating legend lay 
nearer to the spirit of contemporary poetry. Goethe 
had not long before evolved his Mephistopheles from 
the " attendant spirit " attached by that same sixteenth 
century to the Paracelsus of Protestantism, Faust ; 
Tennyson was already meditating a scene full of the 
enchantment of the Arthurian sword Excalibur. 
Browning's peremptory rejection of such springs of 
poetry marks one of his limitations as a poet. Much 
of the finest poetry of Faust^ as, in a lower degree, 
of the Idylls^ is won by a subtle transformation of the 
rude stuff of popular imagination : for Browning, with 
rare exceptions, this rude stuff was dead matter, im- 
pervious to his poetic insight, and irresponsive to the 
magic of his touch. Winnowing the full ears, catch- 
ing eagerly the solid and stimulating grain, he hardly 
heeded the golden gleam of the chaff as it flew by. 

He did not, however, refrain from accentuating his 
view of the story by interweaving in it some gracious 
figures of his own. Festus, the honest, devoted, but 
somewhat purblind friend, who offers Paracelsus the 
criticism of sober common-sense, and is vindicated — 



EARLY LIFE 21 

at the bar of common-sense — by his great comrade's 
tragic end; Michal, an exquisitely tender outline of 
womanhood, even more devoted, and even less dis- 
tinguished ; and the •■' Italian poet " Aprile, a creature 
of genius, whose single overpowering thought avails 
to break down the stronghold of Paracelsus's else un- 
assailable conviction. Aprile, who lives for love as 
Paracelsus for knowledge, is not to be identified with 
Shelley, but he has unmistakable Shelleyan traits, and 
the dreamy pageant of his imaginary creations might 
stand for a summary review of Shelley's work. Had 
Shelley lived, he might have come nearer than any one 
else to fulfilling the rounded and complete ideal of 
which Paracelsus and Aprile were dissevered halves : 
the greater part of his actual achievement belonged. 
Browning evidently thought, to the category of those 
dazzling but imperfectly objective visions which he 
ascribes to his Aprile. But Shelley — the poet of 
Alastor^ the passionate "lover of Love," was yet the 
fittest embodiment of that other finer spiritual energy 
which Paracelsus in his Faustian passion for knowl- 
edge had ruthlessly put from him. Sixteen years later. 
Browning was to define in memorable words what he 
held to be the " noblest and predominating character- 
istic of Shelley " — viz., " his simultaneous perception 
of Power and Love in the Absolute and of Beauty 
and Good in the concrete, while he throws, from his 
poet's station between both, swifter, subtler, and more 
numerous films for the connection of each with each 
than have been thrown by any modern artificer of 
whom I have knowledge." This divining and glori- 



22 BROWNING 

fying power it is that Browning ascribes to Love ; the 
lack of it is in his conception the tragic flaw which 
brings to the ground the superbly gifted genius of 
Paracelsus. This genuine and original tragic motive 
is not worked out with uniform power 5 his degenera- 
tion, his failures, are painted with the uncertain hand 
of one little acquainted with either. But all the splen- 
dour of a young imagination, charged with the passion 
for truth and for beauty, glows in the pictures of the 
great moments in Paracelsus's career, — the scene in 
the quiet Wiirzburg garden, where he conquers the 
doubts of Festus and Michal by the magnificent as- 
surance of his faith in his divine calling ; and that in 
the hospital cell at Salzburg, where his fading mind 
anticipates at the point of death the clearness of im- 
mortal vision as he lays bare the conquered secret of 
the world. 

That Paracelsian secret of the world was for 
Browning doubtless the truth, though he never again 
expounded it so boldly. Paracelsus's reply to the 
anxious inquiry of Festus whether he is sure of God's 
forgiveness : " I have lived ! We have to live alone 
to well set forth God's praise " — might stand as a text 
before the works of Browning. In all life he sees 
the promise and the potency of God, — in the teeming 
vitalities of the lower world, in the creative energies 
of man, in the rich conquests of his Art, in his myth- 
woven Nature. " God is glorified in Man, and to 
man's glory vowed I soul and limb." The historic 
Paracelsus failed most signally in his attempt to con- 
nect vast conceptions of Nature akin to this with the 



EARLY LIFE 23 

detail of his empiric discoveries. Browning, with his 
mind, as always, set upon things psychical, attributes 
to him a parallel incapacity to connect his far-reaching 
vision of humanity with the gross, malicious, or 
blockish specimens of the genus Man whom he en- 
countered in the details of practice. It was the 
problem which Browning himself was to face, and in 
his own view triumphantly to solve ; and Paracelsus, 
rising into the clearness of his dying vision, becomes 
the mouthpiece of Browning's own criticism of his 
failure, the impassioned advocate of the Love which 
with him is less an elemental energy drawing things 
into harmonious fusion than a subtle weapon of the 
intellect, making it wise 

" To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind, 
To know even hate is but a mask of love's, 
To see a good in evil and a hope 
In ill-success." 

Paracelsus is a clear self-revelation, rich and inspired 
where it marks out the circle of sublime ideas within 
which the poet was through life to move, and by 
which he was, as a man and a thinker, if not alto- 
gether as a poet, to live ; reticent where it approaches 
the complexities of the concrete which the poet was 
not yet sufficiently mature to handle, restrained where 
increased power was to breed a too generous self- 
indulgence, a too manifest aptitude for glorifying and 
drinking deep. It is flushed with the peculiar mellow 
beauty which comes if at all to the early manhood of 
genius,— a beauty like that of Amiens or Lincoln in 



24 BROWNING 

Gothic art, where the crudeness of youth is over- 
worn, and the problems of full maturity, though fore- 
shadowed and foreseen, have not yet begun to perplex 
or to disintegrate. 



CHAPTER II 

ENLARGING HORIZONS. SORDELLO 

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in meiner Brust, 
Die eine will sich von der andern trennen; 
Die eine halt in derber Liebeslust 
Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen ; 
Die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust 
Zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen. 

— Faust. 

Paracelsus, though only a series of quasi-dramatic 
scenes, suggested considerable undeveloped capacity 
for drama. From a career in which the most sensa- 
tional event was a dismissal from a professorship, and 
the absorbing passion the thirst for knowledge, he had 
elicited a tragedy of the scientific intellect. But it 
was equally obvious that the writer's talent was not 
purely dramatic ; and that his most splendid and origi- 
nal endowments required some other medium than 
drama for their full unfolding. The author of Para- 
celsus was primarily concerned with character, and with 
action as the mirror of character; agreeing in both 
points substantially with the author of Hamlet. But 
while Browning's energetic temperament habitually 
impelled him to represent character in action, his im- 
aginative strength did not lie in the region of action 
at all, but in the region of thought ; the kinds of ex- 
pression of which he had boundless command were 
rather those which analyse character than those which 

25 



26 BROWNING 

exhibit it. The two impulses derived from tempera- 
ment and from imagination thus drew him in somewhat 
diverse directions ; and for some years the joy in the 
stir and stress and many-sided life of drama competed 
with the powerful bent of the portrayer of souls, until 
the two contending currents finally coalesced in the 
dramatic monologues of Men and Women. In 1835 
the solution was not yet found, but the five years 
which followed were to carry Browning, not without 
crises of perplexity and hesitation, far on his way to- 
wards it. Paracelsus was no sooner completed than he 
entered upon his kindred but more esoteric portrayal 
of the soul-history of Sordello, — a study in which, 
with the dramatic form, almost all the dramatic excel- 
lences of its predecessors are put aside. But the poet 
was outgrowing the method ; the work hung fire ; and 
we find him, before he had gone far with the per- 
plexed record of that " ineffectual angel,*' already 
" eager to freshen a jaded mind by diverting it to the 
healthy natures of a grand epoch." ^ 

The open-eyed man of the world and of affairs ia 
Browning was plainly clamouring for more expression 
than he had yet found. An invitation from the first 
actor of the day to write a tragedy for him was not 
likely, under these circumstances, to be declined ; and 
during the whole winter of 1836-37 the story of Sor- 
dello remained untold, while its author plunged, with 
a security and relish which no one who knew only his 
poetry could have foretold, into the pragmatic politics 
and diplomatic intrigues of Strafford. The perform- 

* Preface to the first edition of Strafford (subsequently omitted). 



ENLARGING HORIZONS 7."] 

ance of the play on May i, 1837, introduced further 
distractions. And Sordello had made little further prog- 
ress, when, in the April of the following year, Brown- 
ing embarked on a sudden but memorable trip to the 
South of Europe. It gave him his first glimpse of 
Italy and of the Mediterranean, and plenty of the rough 
homely intercourse with men which he loved. He 
travelled, in a fashion that suited his purse and his 
hardy nature, by a merchant vessel from London to 
the Adriatic. The food was uneatable, the horrors of 
dirt and discomfort portentous.; but he bore them 
cheerfully for the sake of one advantage, — '^ the soli- 
tariness of the one passenger among all those rough 
new creatures. / like it much, and soon get deep into 
their friendship." ^ Grim tragedies of the high-seas, 
too, came within his ken.^ Two or three moments of 
the voyage stand out for us with peculiar distinctness : 
the gorgeous sunset off Cadiz bay, when he watched 
the fading outlines of Gibraltar and Cape St. Vin- 
cent, — ghostly mementos of England, — not as Arnold's 
weary Titan, but as a Herakles stretching a hand of 
help across the seas ; the other sunset on the Mediter- 
ranean, when Etna loomed against the flaming sky ; ^ 
and, between them, that glaring noontide on the African 
shore, when the " solitary passenger," weary of ship- 
board and seasickness, longed for his good horse York 
in the stable at home, and scribbled his ballad of brave 
horses. How they brought the Good News^ in a blank 

1 R. B. to E. B. B.,\. 505. 

2 Cf. the long letter to Miss Haworth, Orr, Life, p. 96. 

3 Cf. Sordello, bk. iii. end. 



28 BROWNING 

leaf of Bartoli's Simboli. The voyage ended at Trieste ; 
and thence he passed to Venice, brooded among her 
ruined palaces over Sordello, and "English Eyebright** 
and all the destiny and task of the poet ; and so turned 
homeward, through the mountains, gathering vivid 
glimpses as he went of " all my places and castles," ^ 
and laying by a memory, soon to germinate, of " de- 
licious Asolo,'* " palpably fire-clothed " in the glory of 
his young imagination. 

Thus when, in 1840, Sordello was at length complete, 
it bore the traces of many influences and many moods. 
It reflected the expanding ideals and the critical turn- 
ing-points of four years of his life. In the earlier 
books the brilliant yet self-centred poet of Paracelsus 
is still paramount, and even the " oddish boy " who 
had shyly evolved Pauline is not entirely efi^aced. But 
in the later books we recognise without difficulty the 
man who has mixed with the larger world, has won 
some fame in letters, has immersed himself in the stir- 
ring atmosphere of a supreme national conflict, has 
seen Italy, and has, in the solitude and detachment 
from his milieu which foreign travel brings, girded up 
his loins anew for a larger and more exacting poetic 
task. The tangled political dissensions of the time 
are set before us with the baffling allusiveness of the 
expert. The Italian landscape is painted, not with 
richer imagination, for nothing in Browning exceeds 
some passages of the earlier books, but with more 
depth of colouring, more precision of contour and ex- 
pression. And he has taken the " sad dishevelled 

1 lb., p. 99. 



ENLARGING HORIZONS 2() 

form,'* Humanity, for his bride, the mate of an art 
which will disdain no evil and turn away from noth- 
ing common, in the service of man. Doubtless the 
result was not all gain. The intermittent composition 
and the shifting points of view add an element of real 
ambiguity and indecision to faults of expression which 
mainly spring from the swiftness and discursiveness of 
a brilliant and athletic intellect. The alleged " ob- 
scurity " of the poem is in great part a real obscurity ; 
the profiles are at times not merely intricate, but 
blurred. But he had written nothing yet, and he was 
to write little after, which surpasses the finest pages 
of Sordello in close-packed, if somewhat elusive, splen- 
dour ; the soil, as he wrote of Italy, is full of loose fer- 
tility, and gives out intoxicating odours at every foot- 
fall. Moreover, he can now paint the clash and com- 
motion of crowds, the turmoil of cities and armies, 
with superb force — a capacity of which there is hardly 
a trace in Paracelsus. Sordello himself stands out less 
clearly than Paracelsus from the canvas ; but the sym- 
pathetic reader finally admits that this visionary being, 
who gleams ghostlike at the end of all the avenues and 
vistas of the poem, whom we are always looking at 
but never rightly see, is an even more fascinating 
figure. 

He is however less historical, in spite of the ab- 
struse historic background upon which he moves. Of 
the story of Paracelsus Browning merely reinterpreted 
the recorded facts; whereas he brushes aside the 
greater part of the Sordello story, as told confusedly 
and inconsistently by Italian and Provencal tradition. 



30 BROWNING 

The whole later career of the Mantuan poet as an 
accomplished and not unsuccessful man of the world, 
as the friend of Raymond of Toulouse and Charles 
of Anjou, rewarded with ample estates by the latter 
for substantial services, — is either rejected as myth, or 
purposely ignored. To all appearance, the actual 
Sordello by no means lacked ability to " fit to the 
finite " such " infinity " as he possessed. And if he 
had the chance, as is obscurely hinted at the close, of 
becoming, like Dante, the " Apollo " of the Italian 
people, he hardly missed it " through disbelief that 
anything was to be done." But the outward shell of 
his career included some circumstances which, had 
they befallen a Dante, might have deeply moulded the 
history of Italy. His close relations with great 
Guelph and Ghibelline families would have offered 
extraordinary opportunities to a patriot of genius, 
which, for the purposes of patriotism, remained un- 
used. Yet Dante, a patriot of genius if ever there 
was one, had given Sordello a position of extraordi- 
nary honour in the Purgatory^ had allowed him to illu- 
minate the darkness of Virgil, and to guide both the 
great poets towards the Gate. The contrast offered 
an undeniable problem. But Dante had himself 
hinted the solution by placing Sordello among those 
dilatory souls whose tardy repentance involved their 
sojourn in the Antepurgatory. To a mind preoccu- 
pied, like Browning's, with the failures of aspiring 
souls, this hint naturally appealed. He imagined his 
Sordello, too, as a moral loiterer, who, with extraordi- 



ENLARGING HORIZONS 3 1 

nary gifts, failed by some inner enervating paralysis ^ 
to make his spiritual quality explicit ; and who im- 
pressed contemporaries sufficiently to start a brilliant 
myth of what he did not do, but had to wait for rec- 
ognition until he met the eye and lips of Dante. It 
is difficult not to suspect the influence of another 
great poet. Sordello has no nearer parallel in litera- 
ture than Goethe's Tasso^ a picture of the eternal an- 
tagonism between the poet and the world, for which 
Sordello's failure to " fit to the finite his infinity '' 
might have served as an apt motto. Browning has 
nowhere to our knowledge mentioned Tasso ; but he 
has left on record his admiration of the beautiful 
sister-drama Iphigenie? 

The elaboration of this conception is, however, 
entirely Browning's own, and discloses at every point 
the individual quality of his mind. Like Faust^ like 
the Poet in the Palace of Art^ Sordello bears the stamp 
of an age in which the ideal of intellect, art, culture, 
and the ideal of humanity, of social service, have both 
become potent inspirations, often in apparent conflict, 
and continually demanding a solution of their differ- 
ences. Faust breaks away from the narrow pedantries 
of the schools in order to heap upon his breast the 

1 « Ah but to find 
A certain mood enervate such a mind," etc. 

— Works, i. 122. 

2 To E. B. B., July 7, 1846. He is " vexed " at Landor's dis- 
paragement of the play, and quotes with approval Landor's earlier 
declaration that " nothing so Hellenic had been written these two 
thousand years." 



32 BROWNING 

weal and woe of mankind, and to draw all their life 
and thought into the compass of his mind. Tenny- 
son's " glorious devil " (by a curious irony intended 
for no other than Faust's creator) sets up his lordly 
pleasure-house apart from the ways of men, until at 
last, confuted by experience, he renounces his folly. 
Sordello cannot claim the mature and classical brilliance 
of the one, nor the limpid melodious beauty of the 
other ; but it approaches Faust itself in its subtle 
soundings of the mysteries of the intellectual life. It 
is a young poet's attempt to cope with the problem of 
the poet's task and the poet's function, the relation of 
art to life, and of life to art. Neither Goethe nor 
Tennyson thought more loftily of the possibilities of 
poetic art. And neither insisted more peremptorily — 
or rather assumed more unquestioningly — that it only 
fulfils these possibilities when the poet labours in the 
service of man. He is " earth's essential king," but 
his kingship rests upon his carrying out the kingliest 
of mottoes — " Ich dien." Browning all his life had 
a hearty contempt for the foppery of " Art for Art," 
and he never conveyed it with more incisive brilliance 
than in the sketch of Bordello's "opposite," the 
Troubadour Eglamor. 

" How he loved that art ! 
The calling marking him a man apart 
From men — one not to care, take counsel for 
Cold hearts, comfortless faces, . . . since verse, the gift 
Was his, and men, the whole of them, must shift 
Without it." 

To Eglamor his art is a mysterious ritual, of which 



ENLARGING HORIZONS 33 

he is the sacrosanct priest, and his happy rhyme the 
divine response vouchsafed to him in answer. Such 
beauty as he produces is no effluence from a soul mat- 
ing itself, like Wordsworth's, " in love and holy pas- 
sion with the universe," but a cunning application of 
the approved recipes for effective writing current in 
the literary guild j — 

" He, no genius rare, 
Transfiguring in fire or wave or air 
At will, but a poor gnome that, cloistered up 
In some rock-chamber, with his agate-cup, 
His topaz-rod, his seed-pearl, in these few 
And their arrangement finds enough to do 
For his best art." i 

From these mysticisms and technicalities of Trou- 
badour and all other poetic guilds Browning decisively 
detaches his poet. Sordello is not a votary of poetry ; 
he does not " cultivate the Muse " ; he does not even 
prostrate himself before the beauty and wonder of the 
visible universe. Poetry is the atmosphere in which 
he lives ; and in the beauty without he recognises the 
" dream come true " of a soul which (like that of 
Pauline's lover) " existence " thus " cannot satiate, 
cannot surprise." " Laugh thou at envious fate," 
adorers cry to this inspired Platonist, 

" Who, from earth's simplest combination . . . 
Dost soar to heaven's complexest essence, rife 
"With grandeurs, unaffronted to the last, 
Equal to being all." 2 

1 Works, i. 131. * 7/5., 122. 



34 BROWNING 

And, in truth, his power of imaginative apprehension 
has no bounds. From the naive self-reflection of his 
boyish dreams he passes on to visions which embrace 
a continually fuller measure of life, until he forestalls 
the sublime Dantesque conception of a poetry vast and 
deep as humanity, where every soul will stand forth 
revealed in its naked truth. But he cannot, like 
Dante, put his vast conceptions into the shackles of 
intelligible speech. His uncompromising " infinity " 
will not comply with finite conditions, and he remains 
an inefficient and inarticulate genius, a Hamlet of 
poetry. 

In the second half of the poem the Hamlet of 
poetry becomes likewise a Hamlet of politics. He 
aspires to serve the people otherwise than by holding 
up to them the mirror of an all-revealing poetry. 
Though by birth associated with the aristocratic and 
imperial Ghibellines, his natural affinity is clearly with 
the Church, which in some sort stood for the people 
against the nobles, and for spirit against brute force. 
We see him, now, a frail, inspired Shelleyan^ demo- 
crat, pleading the Guelph cause before the great 
Ghibelline soldier Salinguerra, — as he had once pitted 
the young might of native song against the accom- 
plished Troubadour Eglamor. Salinguerra is the foil 
of the political, as Eglamor of the literary, Sordello, 
and the dramatic interest of the whole poem focusses 
in those two scenes. He had enough of the lonely 
inspiration of genius to vanquish the craftsman, but 

' There are other Shelleyan traits in Sordello — e. g., the young 
witch image (as in Pauline) at the opening of the second book. 



ENLARGING HORIZONS 35 

too little of its large humanity to cope with the astute 
man of the world. When Salinguerra, naturally de- 
clining his naive entreaty that he should put his 
Ghibelline sword at the service of the Guelph, offers 
Sordello, on his part, the command of the imperial 
forces in Italy if he will remain true to the Ghibelline 
cause, he makes this finite world more alluring than it 
had ever been before to the " infinite " Sordello. 
After a long struggle, he renounces the offer, and — 
dies, exhausted with the strain of choice. 

What was Browning's judgment upon Sordello ? 
Does he regard him as an idealist of aims too lofty 
for success in this world, and whose " failure " im- 
plied his triumph in another, where his " broken arc '* 
would become the " perfect round " ? Assuredly not. 
That might indeed be his destiny, but Browning 
makes it perfectly clear that he failed, not because his 
ideal was incommensurate with the conditions in 
which he lived, but because he lacked the supreme 
gift by which the greatest of souls may find their 
function and create their sphere in the least promising 
milieu^ — a controlling and guiding passion of love. 
With compassionate tenderness, as of a father to his 
wayward child. Browning in the closing pages of the 
poem lays his finger on the ailing place. " Ah, my 
Sordello, I this once befriend and speak for you." It 
was true enough, in the past, that Soul, as belonging 
to Eternity, must needs prove incomplete for Time. 
But is life to be therefore only a struggle to escape 
from the shackles of the body ? Is freedom only won 
by death ? No, rejoins the poet, and the reply comes 



36 BROWNING 

from the heart of his poetry, though at issue with 
much of his explicit doctrine ; a harmony of soul 
and body is possible here in which both fulfil their 
functions : 

" Like yonder breadth of watery heaven, a bay, 
And that sky-space of water, ray for ray 
And star for star, one richness where they mixed," 

the Soul seeing its way in Time without being either 
dazzled by, or losing, its vision of Eternity, having 
the saving clue of Love. Dante, for whom Love 
was the pervading spirit of the universe, and the be- 
ginning and end of his inspiration, wrought his vision 
of eternal truth and his experience of the passing lives 
of men into such a harmony with unexampled power; 
and the comparison, implicit in every page of Sordello^ 
is driven home with almost scornful bitterness on the 
last : — 

" What he should have been, 
Could be, and was not — the one step too mean 
For him to take — we suffer at this day 
Because of: Ecelin had pushed away 
Its chance ere Dante could arrive and take 
That step Sordello spurned, for the world's sake. 

. . . A sorry farce 
Such life is, after all ! " 

The publication of Sordello in 1 840 closes the first 
phase of Browning's literary career. By the great ma- 
jority of those who had hailed the splendid promise 
of Paracelsus^ the author of Sordello was frankly given 
up. Surprisingly few thought it worth while to 



ENLARGING HORIZONS 



37 



wrestle with the difficult book. It was the day of the 
gentle literary public which had a few years before 
recoiled from Sartor Resartus^ and which found in the 
difficulty of a book the strongest presumption against 
it. A later generation, leavened by Carlyle, came 
near to regarding difficulty as a presumption in its 
favour, and this more strenuous and athletic attitude 
towards literature was among the favouring conditions 
which brought Browning at length into vogue. 



CHAPTER III 

MATURING METHODS. DRAMAS AND DRAMATIC 

LYRICS 

Since Chaucer was alive and hale. 
No man hath walk'd along our roads with step 
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue 
So varied in discourse. 

— Landor. 

The memorable moment when Browning, standing 
on the ruined palace-step at Venice, had taken Hu- 
manity for his mate, opened an epoch in his poetic 
life to which the later books of Sordello form a splen- 
did prelude. For the Browning of 1840 it was no 
longer a sufficient task to trace the epochs in the spir- 
itual history of lonely idealists, to pursue the problem 
of existence in minds themselves preoccupied with its 
solution. " Soul " is still his fundamental preoccupa- 
tion ; but the continued play of an eager intellect and 
vivacious senses upon life has immensely multiplied 
the points of concrete experience which it vivifies and 
transfigures to his eyes. It is as if a painter trained 
in the school of Raphael or Lionardo had discovered 
that he could use the minute and fearless brush of the 
Flemings in the service of their ideals. He pursues 
soul in all its rich multiplicity, in the tortuosities and 
dark abysses of character; he forces crowds of sordid, 
grotesque, or commonplace facts to become its ex- 

38 



MATURING METHODS 39 

pressive speech ; he watches its thought and passion 
projected into the tide of affairs, caught up in the 
clash and tangle of plot. In all these three ways the 
Dramas and Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, which 
were to be his poetic occupation during the Forties, 
detach themselves sharply from Paracelsus and the early 
books of Sordello. A poem like The Laboratory (1844), 
for instance, stands at almost the opposite pole of art 
to these. All that Browning neglected or veiled in 
Paracelsus he here thrusts into stern relief. The pas- 
sion and crime there faintly discerned in the back- 
ground of ideally beautiful figures are here his absorb- 
ing theme. The curious technicalities of the chem- 
ist's workshop, taken for granted in Paracelsus^ are 
now painted with a realism reminiscent of Romeo's 
Apothecary and The Alchemist. And the outward 
drama of intrigue, completely effaced in Paracelsus by 
the inward drama of soul, sounds delusive scorn and 
laughter in the background, the more sinister because 
it is not seen. These lyrics and romances are " dra- 
matic " not only in the sense that the speakers ex- 
press, as Browning insisted, other minds and senti- 
ments than his own, but in the more legitimate sense 
that they are plucked as it were out of the living or- 
ganism of a drama, all the vital issues of which can 
be read in their self-revelation. 

A poet whose lyrics were of this type might be ex- 
pected to find in drama proper his free, full, and nat- 
ural expression. This was not altogether the case 
with Browning, who, despite an unquenchable appe- 
tency for drama, did better work in his dramatic mon- 



40 BROWNING 

ologues than in his plays. The drama alone allowed 
full scope for the development of plot-interest. But 
it was less favourable to another yet more deeply 
rooted interest of his. Not only did action and out- 
ward event — the stuff of drama — interest Browning 
chiefly as " incidents in the development of soul/' but 
they became congenial to his art only as projected 
upon some other mind, and tinged with its feeling and 
its thought. Half the value of a story for him lay 
in the colours it derived from the narrator's personal- 
ity ; and he told his own experience, as he uttered his 
own convictions, most easily and effectively through 
alien lips. For a like reason he loved to survey the 
slow continuities of actual events from the standpoint 
of a given moment, under the conditions of perspec- 
tive and illusion which it imposed. Both these con- 
ditions were less well satisfied by drama, which 
directly " imitates action," than by the dramatic 
speech or monologue, which imitates action as focussed 
in a particular mind. And Browning's dramatic 
genius found its most natural and effective outlet in 
the wealth of implicit drama which he concentrated 
in these salient moments tense with memory and 
hope. The insuppressible alertness and enterprise of 
his own mind tells upon his portrayal of these intense 
moments. He sees passion not as a blinding fume, 
but as a flame, which enlarges the area, and quickens 
the acuteness, of vision ; the background grows alive 
with moving shapes. To the stricken girl in Te 
Banks and Braes memory is torture, and she thrusts 
convulsively from her, like dagger-points, the intolera- 



MATURING METHODS 4 1 

ble loveliness of the things that remind her of her 
love ; whereas the victim of The Confessional pours 
forth from her frenzied lips every detail of her tragic 
story. 

So in The Laboratory^ once more, all the strands of 
the implicit drama are seen like incandescent filaments 
in the glow of a single moment of fierce impassioned 
consciousness : 

" He is with her, and they know that I know 

Where they are, what they do : they believe my tears flow 
"While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear 
Empty church, to pray God in, for them ! — I am here." 

Both kinds — drama and dramatic lyric — continued to 
attract him, while neither altogether satisfied ; and 
they engaged him concurrently throughout the decade. 
In this power of seizing the salient moment of a 
complex situation and laying bare at a stroke all its 
issues, Browning's monologues have no nearer paral- 
lel than the Imaginary Conversations of Landor, which 
illuminate with so strange a splendour so many un- 
recorded scenes of the great drama of history. To 
Landor, according to his wife's testimony, Browning 
" always said that he owed more than to any contem- 
porary " ; to Landor he dedicated the last volume of 
the Bells and Pomegranates. Landor, on his part, 
hailed in Browning the " inquiring eye " and varied 
discourse of a second Chaucer. It is hardly rash to 
connect with his admiration for the elder artist Brown- 
ing's predilection for these brief revealing glimpses 
into the past. Browning cared less for the actual 



42 BROWNING 

personnel of history, and often imagined his speakers 
as well as their talk ; but he imagined them with an 
equal instinct for seizing the expressive traits of na- 
tionalities and of times, and a similar, if more spon- 
taneous and naive, anti-feudal temper. The French 
camp and the Spanish cloister, Gismond and My Last 
Duchess (originally called France and Italy\ are pene- 
trated with the spirit of peoples, ages, and institutions 
as seized by a historical student of brilliant imagina- 
tion and pronounced antipathies. 

But in one point Landor and Browning stood at 
opposite poles. Landor, far beyond any contemporary 
English example, had the classic sense and mastery of 
style ; Browning's individuality of manner rested on a 
robust indifference to all the traditional conventions 
of poetic speech. The wave of realism which swept 
over English letters in the early 'P'orties broke down 
many barriers of language ; the new things that had 
to be said demanded new ways of saying them ; 
homely, grotesque, or sordid life was rendered in 
sordid, grotesque, and homely terms. Pickwick in 
1837 had established the immense vogue of Dickens, 
the Heroes in 1840 had assured the imposing prestige 
of Carlyle; and the example of both made for the 
freest and boldest use of language. Across the Chan- 
nel the stupendous fabric of the Comed'ie Humaine was 
approaching completion, and Browning was one of 
Balzac's keenest English readers. Alone among the 
greater poets of the time Browning was in genius 
and temperament a true kinsman to these great ro- 
mantic realists ; his poetry, as it emerged in the rich 



MATURING METHODS 43 

dramatic harvest of the 'Forties, is the nearest coun- 
terpart and analogue of their prose. 

I 

Browning's first drama, as is well known, was the 
result of a direct application from Macready. Intro- 
duced in November, 1835, by his "literary father" 
Fox, Browning immediately interested the actor. A 
reading of Paracelsus convinced him that Browning 
could write, if not a good play, yet one with an 
effective tragic role for himself. Strained relations 
with his company presently made him eager to pro- 
cure this service. Browning, suddenly appealed to 
(in May, 1836), promptly suggested Strafford, He 
was full of the subject, having recently assisted his 
friend Forster in compiling his life. The actor closed 
with the suggestion, and a year later (May i, 1837) 
the play was performed at Covent Garden. The fine 
acting of Macready, and of Helen Faucit, who was 
now associated with him, procured the piece a mod- 
erate success. It went through five performances. 

Browning's Strafford^ like his Paracelsus^ was a 
serious attempt to interpret a historic character ; and 
historic experts like Gardiner have, as regards the 
central figure, emphatically indorsed his judgment. 
The other persons, and the action itself, he treated 
more freely, with evident regard to their value as 
secondary elements in the portrayal of Strafford ; and 
it is easy to trace in the whole manner of his innova- 
tions the well-marked ply of his mind. The harsh 
and rugged fanaticisms, the splendid frivolities, of the 



44 BROWNING 

seventeenth century, fade and lose substance in an 
atmosphere charged with idealism and self-conscious- 
ness. Generous self-devotion is not the universal 
note, but it is the prevailing key, that in which the 
writer most naturally thinks and most readily invents. 
Strafford's devotion to Charles and Pym's to his 
country were historical ; but Browning accentuates 
Pym's heroism by making the man he sends to the 
scaffold his old friend ; and devotion is the single trait 
of the beautiful but imaginary character of Lucy 
Carlisle. " Give me your notion of a thorough self- 
devotement, self-forgetting," he wrote a (ew years 
later to Miss Flower: the idea seems to have been 
already busy moulding his still embryonic invention 
of character. Something of the visionary exaltation 
of the dying Paracelsus thus hangs over the final 
scene in which Strafford goes to meet the fate which 
the one friend imposes on him and the other cannot 
turn aside. All the characters have something of the 
" deep self-consciousness " of the author of Pauline. 
Not that they are, any of them, drawn with very 
profound grasp of human nature or a many-sided 
apprehension of life. They are either absolutely 
simple, like Lady Carlisle, or built upon a rivalry or 
conflict of simple elements, like Strafford and Charles ; 
but there is so much restless vivacity in their dis- 
course, the broad surface of mood is so incessantly 
agitated by the play and cross-play of thought and 
feeling, that they seem more complex than they are. 

Though played for only five nights, Strafford had 
won a success which might well have dazzled a young 



MATURING METHODS 45 

and untried aspirant, and which was sufficiently im- 
pressive to shrewd men of business like Messrs. 
Longman to induce them to undertake its publication 
free of cost. It appeared in April, with an interest- 
ing preface, subsequently withdrawn, from which a 
significant sentence has already been quoted. The 
composition of Strafford had not only " freshened a 
jaded mind " but permanently quickened his zest for 
the drama of political crises. New projects for his- 
torical dramas chased and jostled one another through 
his busy brain, which seems to have always worked 
most prosperously in a highly charged atmosphere. I 
am going " to begin . . . thinking a Tragedy,*' 
he wrote characteristically to Miss Haworth — ''(an 
Historical one, so I shall want heaps of criticisms on 
Strafford)^ and I want to have another tragedy in 
prospect; I write best so provided."^ 

The " Historical Tragedies " here foreshadowed. 
King Victor and King Charles and The Return of the 
Druses^ were eventually published as the Second and 
Fourth of the Bells and Pomegranates^ in 1842-43. 
How little Browning cared for history except as a 
quarry for psychical problems, how little concern he 
had at bottom with the changing drama of national 
life, is clear from the directions in which he now 
sought his good. In Strafford as in Paracelsus^ and 
even in Sordello^ the subject had made some appeal to 
the interest in great epochs and famous men. Hence- 
forth his attitude, as a dramatist, to history is a curi- 
ous blend of the historical specialist who explores the 
1 Orr, Life, p. 103. 



46 BROWNING 

recondite byways of history, and the romantic poet 
who abandons actuality altogether. He seeks his 
heroes in remote sequestered corners of the world, — 
Sardinia, Juliers, Lebanon ; but actual historic re- 
search gradually yields ground to a free invention 
which, however, always simulates historic truth. 
King Victor and King Charles contains far less poetry 
than Paracelsus^ but it was the fruit of historic studies 
no less severe. There was material for genuine 
tragedy in the story. The old king, who after fifty 
years of despotic rule shifts the crown to the head of 
his son with the intention of still pulling the wires 
behind the scenes, but, finding that Charles means to 
rule as well as reign, clutches angrily at his surren- 
dered crown, — this King Victor has something in 
him of Lear, something of the dying Henry IV. But 
history provided more sober issues, and Browning's 
temperament habitually inclined him to stave off the 
violence of tragic passion which disturbs the subtle 
eddyings of thought and feeling. Charles is no 
Regan, hardly even an Albany, no weakling either, 
but a man of sensitive conscience, who shifts and 
gyrates responsively to the complex play of motive 
which Browning brings to bear upon him. Reluc- 
tantly he orders Victor's arrest, and when the old 
man, baffled and exasperated, is brought before him 
and imperiously demands the crown, he puts it upon 
his father's head. Neither character is drawn with 
the power of Strafford, but the play is largely built 
upon the same contrasts between personal devotion 
and political expediency, the untutored idealism of 



MATURING METHODS 47 

youth and the ruses or rigidity of age. This was a 
type of dramatic action which Brownuig imagined 
with peculiar power and insight, for it bodied forth a 
contrast between contending elements of his own 
nature. Towards this type all his drama tended to 
gravitate. In The Return of the Druses Browning's 
native bent can be more freely studied, for history has 
contributed only the general situation. His turn for 
curious and far-fetched incident is nowhere better 
illustrated than in this tangled intrigue carried on 
between Prankish Hospitallers, Venetians, and Druses 
of Lebanon in a lonely island of the iEgean where 
none of the three are at home. A political revolu- 
tion — the revolt of the Druses against their Frankish 
lords — provides the outer momentum of the action ; 
but the central interest is concentrated upon a " Soul's 
tragedy," in which the conflict of races goes on 
within the perplexed and paralysed bosom of a single 
man. Djabal, the Druse patriot brought up in Brit- 
tany, analyses his own character with the merciless 
self-consciousness of Browning himself: 

" I with my Arab instinct — thwarted ever 
By my Frank policy, and with in turn 
My Frank brain thwarted by my Arab heart — 
While these remained in equipoise, I lived — 
Nothing ; had either been predominant, 
As a Frank schemer or an Arab mystic 
I had been something." 

The conflict between policy and devotion is now 
transferred to the arena of a single breast, where its 
nature is somewhat too clearly understood and formu- 



48 BROWNING 

lated. The " Frank schemer " conceives the plan of 
turning the Druse superstition to account by posing 
as an incarnation of their Founder. But the " Arab 
mystic " is too near sharing the belief to act his part 
with ease, and while he is still paltering the devoted 
Anael slays the Prefect. The play is thenceforth oc- 
cupied, ostensibly, with the efforts of the Christian 
authorities to discover and punish the murderers. Its 
real subject is the subtle changes wrought in Djabai 
and Anael by their gradual transition from the relation 
of prophet and devotee to that of lovers. Her pas- 
sion, even before he comes to share it, has begun to 
sap the security of his false pretensions : he longs, 
not at first to disavow them, but to make them true : 
he will be the prophetic helper of his people in very 
deed. To the outer world he maintains his claim 
with undiminished boldness and complete success; 
but the inner supports are gradually giving way, Arab 
mystic and Frank schemer lose their hold, and 

« A third and better nature rises up, 
My mere man's nature." 

Anael, a simpler character than any previous woman 
of the plays, thus has a more significant function. 
Lady Carlisle fumbles blindly with the dramatic issues 
without essentially affecting them ; Polyxena furthers 
them with loyal counsel, but is not their main execu- 
tant. Anael, in her fervid devotion, not only precipi- 
tates the catastrophe, but emancipates her lover from 
the thraldom of his lower nature. In her Browning 
for the first time in drama represented the purifying 



MATURING METHODS 49 

power of Love. The transformations of soul by soul 
were already beginning to occupy Browning's imagi- 
nation. The poet of Cristina and Saul was already 
foreshadowed. But nothing as yet foreshadowed the 
kind of spiritual influence there portrayed — that 
which, instead of making its way through the impact 
of character upon character, passion upon passion, is 
communicated through an unconscious glance or a 
song. For one who believed as fixedly as Browning 
in the power of these moments to change the prevail- 
ing bias of character and conduct, such a conception 
was full of implicit drama. A chance inspiration led 
him to attempt to show how a lyric soul flinging its 
soul-seed unconsciously forth in song might become 
the involuntary deus ex machina in the tangle of pas- 
sion and plot through which she moved, resolving its 
problems and averting its catastrophes. 

The result was a poem which Elizabeth Barrett 
" could find it in her heart to envy " its author, which 
Browning himself (in 1845) liked better than any- 
thing else he had yet done.^ It has won a not less 
secure place in the affections of all who care for 
Browning at all. It was while walking alone in a 
wood near Dulwich, we are told by Mrs. Orr, that 
" the idea flashed upon him of some one walking thus 
through life ; one apparently too obscure to leave a 
trace of his or her passage, yet exercising a lasting 
though unconscious influence at every step of It ; and 
the image shaped itself into the little silk-winder of 
Asolo." ^ The most important effect of this design 
1 Letters of R. and E. B. B., i. 28. 2 Orr, Handbook^ p, 55. 



50 BROWNING 

was to call out Browning's considerable powers of 
rendering those gross, lurid, unspiritualised elements 
of the human drama upon which Pippa was to flash 
her transforming spell. His somewhat burly jocosity 
had expatiated freely in letters ; but he had done noth- 
ing which, like the cynical chafF of his art students, 
suggests the not unskilful follower of Balzac and 
Dickens. And he had given no hint of the elemental 
tragic power shown in the great Ottima and Sebald 
scene, nor of the fierce and cruel sensuality, the mag- 
nificence in sin, of Ottima herself. 

Pippa Passes^ the most romantic in conception of all 
Browning's plays, thus first disclosed his genius for 
realism. Strafford^ King Victor^ The Druses are 
couched in the tempered ideality of blank verse ; here 
we pass to and fro from the airiest lyric to the most 
massive and sinewy prose. It counted for something, 
too, that Italy, and above all the little hill-town in 
which the scene was laid, was a vivid personal mem- 
ory, not a vague region of fancy like his Sardinia or 
Lebanon. Asolo, with its walls and turret, its 
bishop's palace and duomo, and girls sitting on the 
steps, its upland farms among the cherry orchards, its 
beetles sparkling along the dust, its "warm slow yel- 
low moonlit nights " of May, and " glaring pomps " 
of June, — Asolo, with its legend of " Kate the 
queen " and her carolling page, lives as few other 
spots do for Browning's readers. Pippa herself, in 
her exquisite detachment from the sordid humanity 
amid which she moves, might have appeared too like 
a visionary presence, not of earth though on it, had 



MATURING METHODS 5 I 

she not been brought into touch, at so many points, 
with things that Browning had seen. Pippa Passes 
has, among Browning's dramas, the same kind of pe- 
culiar interest which belongs to the Tempest and to 
Faust among Shakespeare's and Goethe's. Faery and 
devilry were not Browning's affairs ; but, within the 
limits of his resolute humanism, Pippa Passes is an 
ideal construction, shadowing forth, under the sem- 
blance of a single definite bit of life, the controlling 
elements, as Browning imagined them, in all life. 
For Browning, too, the world teemed with Stephanos 
and Trinculos, Sebastians and Antonios ; it was, none 
the less, a magical Isle, where strange catastrophes 
and unsuspected revolutions sprang suddenly into be- 
ing at the unseen carol of Ariel as he passed. Brown- 
ing's Ariel is the organ of a spiritual power which, 
unlike Prospero, seeks not merely to detect and avert 
crime, or merely to dismiss the would-be criminal, 
forgiven, to " live and deal with others better," but to 
renovate character; to release men from the bondage 
of their egoisms by those influences, slight as a flower- 
bell or a sunset touch, which renew us by setting all 
our aims and desires in a new proportion. 

II 

Browning's first four plays seemed to mark a grow- 
ing neglect of the requirements and traditions of the 
stage. He might even appear to have renounced the 
stage altogether when in 1841 he arranged with 
Moxon to publish his writings in a cheap pamphlet 
form. The first number of Bells and Pomegranates 



53t 



BROWNING 



contained the least theatrical of his dramas, Pippa 
Passes. " Two or three years ago " he declared in 
the preface (not reprinted), " I wrote a play, about 
which the chief matter I much care to recollect at 
present is that a Pit-full of good-natured people ap- 
plauded it. Ever since I have been desirous of doing 
something in the same way that should better reward 
their attention. What follows I mean for the first of 
a series of Dramatical Pieces, to come out at inter- 
vals ; and I amuse myself by fancying that the cheap 
mode in which they appear will for once help me to 
a sort of Pit-audience again." 

But Browning's ambition for fame as a maker of 
plays was still keen, and nothing but a renewed invi- 
tation to write for the stage was needed to lure him 
back into tentative compliance with its ways. In the 
course of 1841 Macready intervened with a request 
for another play from the author of Strafford} 
Thereupon Browning produced with great rapidity J 
Blot in the 'Scutcheon, After prolonged and some- 
what sordid green-room vicissitudes, it was performed 
on Feb. 11, 1843. Macready, its first begetter, did 
his best to wreck it ; the majority of the players re- 
fused to understand their parts ; but through the fine 
acting of Helen Faucit (Mildred) and Phelps (Lord 
Tresham), it achieved a moderate but brief success. 

The choice of subject indicates, as has been said, a 

desire to make terms with stage tradition. But the 

ordinary theatre-goer, who went expecting to witness 

what the title appeared to promise, found himself, as 

> The date is fixed by Browning's statement (Orr, p. 119). 



MATURING METHODS 53 

the play proceeded, perplexed and out of his bearings. 
An English nobleman, with the deep-engrained family 
pride of his order, had suffered, or was to suffer, dis- 
honour. But this seemingly commonplace motif vfzs 
developed in a strange and unfamiliar ethical atmos- 
phere — an atmosphere of moral ideas which seemed to 
embrace both those who upheld the feudal honour and 
those who " blotted " it ; to hint at a purity deeper 
than sin. In a more sinister sense than Colombe^s 
Birthday^ this play might have been prefaced by the 
beautiful motto of its successor : — 

** Ivy and violet, what do ye here 
With blossom and shoot in the warm spring weather 
Hiding the arms of Montecchi and Vere ? " 

The love of Mildred and Mertoun, which blots the 
Tresham 'scutcheon, is in origin as innocent as that 
which breaks into flower across the royal ambitions of 
Colombe ; and their childlike purity of passion be- 
comes, in spite of the wrong to which it has led them, 
the reconciling fact upon which at the close all ani- 
mosities and resentments die away. The conception 
is genuinely tragic, for the doom which descends upon 
them all is a Nemesis which they have all contributed 
to provoke, but which none of them deserves ; and 
which precisely the blended nobility and naivete of 
Mildred and Mertoun prevents from passing by them 
altogether. More mature or less sensitive lovers 
would have found an issue from the situation as easily 
as an ordinary Hamlet from his task of vengeance. 
But Mertoun and Mildred are at once too timid and 



54 



BROWNING 



too audacious, too tremulous in their consciousness of 
guilt, too hardy and reckless in their mutual devotion, 
to carry through so difficult a game. Mertoun falters 
and stammers in his suit to Tresham ; Mildred stands 
mute at her brother's charge, incapable of evasion, 
only resolute not to betray. Yet these same two chil- 
dren in the arts of politic self-defence are found reck- 
lessly courting the peril of midnight meetings in Mil- 
dred's chamber with the aid of all the approved 
resources and ruses of romance — the disguise, the 
convenient tree, the signal set in the window, the 
lover's serenade. And when the lover, who dared all 
risks to his lady and to himself for a stolen interview 
with her night by night, finally encounters Tresham, 
he is instantly paralysed, and will not even lift a 
sword in his own defence. Upon this union of 
boundless daring for one another's sake and sensibility 
to the shame of having wronged the house and blotted 
the 'scutcheon Mertoun's fate hangs, and with his 
Mildred's, and with hers Tresham's. 

Beside the tragedy and the stain of the love of 
Mertoun and Mildred, Browning characteristically 
sets the calm, immaculate, cousinly affection of Gwen- 
dolen and Austin. One has a glimpse here of his 
habitual criticism of all satisfied attainment, of all 
easy completeness on a low plane. It is Gwendolen 
herself who half disarms that criticism, or makes it, 
as applied to her, more pathetic than trenchant by in- 
stantly detecting and proclaiming the different quality 
of Mertoun's love. " Mark him, Austin : that's true 
love ! Ours must begin again." In Tresham Brown- 



MATURING METHODS 55 

ing seems to have designed to portray the finest type 
of ancestral pride. He is " proud " of his " inter- 
minable line," because the men were all " paladins " 
and the women all of flawless honour ; and he has 
the chivalrous tenderness of ideal knighthood, as well 
as its honourable pride. When Mertoun has received 
his death-stroke and told his story, the tenderness 
comes out ; the sullied image of his passionately loved 
sister not only recovers its appeal, but rises up before 
him in mute intolerable reproach ; and Mildred has 
scarcely breathed her last in his arms when Tresham 
succumbs to the poison he has taken in remorse for 
his hasty act. It is unlucky that this tragic climax, 
finely conceived as it is, is marred by the unconscious 
burlesque of his " Ah, — I had forgotten : I am dying." 
In such things one feels Browning's want of the 
unerring sureness of a great dramatist at the crucial 
moments of action. 

Although not brilliantly successful on the boards, A 
Blot in the ^Scutcheon made a deep impression upon 
the more competent part of the audience. For 
Browning himself the most definite result was that 
Macready passed out of his life — for twenty years 
they never met — and that his most effective link with 
the stage was thus finally severed. But his more dis- 
tant and casual relations with it were partly balanced 
by the much enlarged understanding of dramatic effect 
which he had by this time won; and A Blot in the 
''Scutcheon was followed by a drama which attains a 
beauty and charm not far below that of Pippa Passes 
under the conditions of a regular dramatic plot. The 



56 BROWNING 

ostensible subject of Colomhe' s Birthday is a political 
crisis on the familiar lines ; — an imperilled throne in 
the centre of interest, a background of vague op- 
pression and revolt. But as compared with King 
Victor or The Druses the dispute is harmless, the 
tumult of revolution easily overheard. The diplo- 
matic business is not etherealised into romance, like 
the ladies' embassy in Love's Labour's Lost; but 
neither is it allowed to become grave or menacing. 
Berthold's arrival to present his claim to the govern- 
ment of this miniature state affects us somewhat like 
the appearance of a new and formidable player in 
some drawing-room diversion ; and the " treason '* 
of the courtiers like the " unfairness " of children at 
play. Nevertheless, the victory of love over political 
interest which the motto foreshadows is not accom- 
plished without those subtle fluctuations and sur- 
prises which habitually mark the conduct of Brown- 
ing*s plots. The alternative issues gain in seriousness 
and ideality as we proceed, and Browning has nowhere 
expressed the ideal of sovereignty more finely than it 
is expressed in this play, by the man for whose sake a 
sovereign is about to surrender her crown.^ Colombe 
herself is one of Browning's most gracious and win- 
ning figures. She brings the ripe decision of woman- 
hood to bear upon a series of diflicult situations 
without losing the bright glamour of her youth. Her 

* This fine speech of Valence to the greater glory of his rival 
(Act iv.) is almost too subtle for the stage. Browning with good 
reason directed its omission unless " a very good Valence " could 
be found. 



MATURING METHODS 57 

inborn truth and nature draw her on as by a quiet 
momentum, and gradually liberate her from the sway 
of the hollow fictions among which her lot is cast. 
Valence, the outward instrument of this liberation, is 
not the least noble of that line of chivalrous lovers 
which reaches from Gismond to Caponsacchi. With 
great delicacy the steps are marked in this inward and 
spiritual " flight " of Colombe. Valence's " way of 
love " is to make her realise the glory and privileges 
of the rulership which places her beyond his reach, 
at the very moment when she is about to resign it 
in despair. She discovers the needs of the woman 
and the possibilities of power at the same time, and 
thus is brought, by Valence's means, to a mood in 
which Prince Berthold's offer of his hand and crown 
together weighs formidably, for a moment, against 
Valence's offer of his love alone, until she discovers 
that Berthold is the very personation, in love and in 
statecraft alike, of the fictions from which she had 
escaped. Then, swiftly recovering herself, she sets 
foot finally on the firm ground where she had first 
sought her " true resource." 

Berthold, like Blougram, Ogniben, and many an- 
other of Browning's mundane personages, is a subtler 
piece of psychology than men of the type of Valence, 
in whom his own idealism flows freely forth. He 
comes before us with a weary nonchalance admirably 
contrasted with the fiery intensity of Valence. He 
means to be emperor one day, and his whole life is a 
process of which that is to be the product ; but he 
.finds the process unaffectedly boring. Without 



58 BROWNING 

relaxing a whit in the mechanical pursuit of his end, 
he views life with much mental detachment, and 
shows a cool and not unsympathetic observation of 
men who pursue other ideals, as well as an abundance 
of critical irony towards those who apparently share 
his own. An adept in courtly arts, and owing all his 
successes to courtly favour, he meets the assiduities 
of other courtiers with open contempt. His ends 
are those of Laertes or Fortinbras, and he is quite 
capable of the methods of Rosencrantz and Guilden- 
stern ; but he regards ends and methods alike with 
the sated distaste of Hamlet. By birth and principle 
a man of action, he has, even more than most of 
Browning's men of action, the curious introspective- 
ness of the philosophic onlooker. He " watches 
his mind," and if he does not escape illusions, 
recognises and exposes them with ironical candour. 
Few of Browning's less right-minded persons attain 
final insight at less cost to dramatic propriety than 
Berthold when he pronounces his final verdict : — 

" All is for the best. 
Too costly a flower were this, I see it now, 
To pluck and set upon my barren helm 
To wither, — any garish plume will do." 

Colomhis Birthday was published in 1844 as No. 6 
of the BelU^ but had for the present no prospect of 
the stage. Nine years later, however, the loyal 
Phelps, who had so doughtily come to the rescue 
of its predecessor, put it successfully on the boards 
of his theatre at Sadler's Wells. 



MATURING METHODS 59 

The most buoyant of optimists has moments of self- 
mockery, and the hardiest believer in ideal truth moods 
in which poetry seems the phantom and prose the fact. 
Such a mood had its share in colouring the dramatic 
sketch which, it is now pretty evident, Browning wrote 
not long after finishing Colomhe s Birthday} That play 
is a beautiful triumph of poetry over prose, of soul and 
heart over calculation and business. A Soul's Tragedy 
exhibits the inverse process : the triumph of mundane 
policy and genial s avoir fair e in the person of Ogniben 
over the sickly and equivocal " poetry " of Chiappino. 
Browning seems to have thrown off this bitter parody 
of his own idealisms in a mood like that in which Ibsen 
conceived the poor blundering idealist of the Wild 
Duck. Chiappino is Browning's Werle ; the reverse 
side of a type which he had drawn with so much in- 
dulgence in the Luigi of Pippa Passes. Plainly, it was 
a passing mood ; as plainly, a mood which, from the 
high and luminous vantage-ground of 1846, he could 
look back upon with regret, almost with scorn. His 
intercourse with Elizabeth Barrett was far advanced 
before she was at length reluctantly allowed to see it. 
"For The Soul's Tragedy^" he wrote (Feb. 11) — 
" that will surprise you, I think. There is no trace 

1 Browning's letter to Elizabeth Barrett, Feb. 13, 1846, which 
does not seem to have been adequately noticed. The piece is ig- 
nored by Mrs. Orr. He speaks of suspending the publication of 
the " unlucky play " until a second edition of the Be//s — an " ap- 
parition " which Moxon, he says, seems to think possible ; and then 
inserting it before Luria : it will then be " in its place, for it was 
written two or three years ago." In other words. The SouVs Tragedy 
was written in 1843-44, between Colojnbe's Birthday and Luria. 



60 BROWNING 

of you there, — you have not put out the black face of 
// — it is all sneering and disillusion — and shall not be 
printed but burned if you say the word." This word 
his correspondent, needless to add, did not say ; on the 
contrary, she found it even more impressive than its 
successor Luria. This was, however, no tribute to its 
stage qualities ; for in hardly one of his plays is the 
stage more openly ignored. The dramatic form, 
though still preserved, sets strongly towards mono- 
logue ; the entire second act foreshadows unmistakably 
the great portrait studies of Men and Women ; it 
might be called Ognihen with about as good right as 
they are called Lippo Lippi or Blougram ; the person- 
ality of the supple ecclesiastic floods and takes posses- 
sion of the entire scene ; we see the situation and the 
persons through the brilliant ironic mirror of his mind. 
The Chiappino of the second act is Ogniben's Chiap- 
pino, as Gigadibs is Blougram's Gigadibs. His 
" tragedy '' is one in which there is no room for terror 
or pity, only for contempt. All real stress of circum- 
stance is excluded. .Both sides fight with blunted 
weapons; the revolt is like one of those Florentine 
risings which the Brownings later witnessed with 
amusement from the windows of Casa Guidi, which 
were liable to postponement because of rain. The 
prefect who is " assassinated " does not die, and the 
rebellious city is genially bantered into submission. 
The " soul " of Chiappino is, in fact, not the stuff of 
which tragedy is made. Even in his instant acceptance 
of Luitolfo's blood-stained cloak when the pursuers are, 
as he thinks, at the door, he seems to have been casu- 



MATURING METHODS 6 1 

ally switched off the proper lines of his character into 
a piece of heroism which properly belongs to the man 
he would like to be thought, but has not the strength 
to be. On the whole, Browning's scorn must be 
considered to have injured his art. Tragedy, in the 
deepest sense, lay beyond his sphere; and this "trag- 
edy " of mere degeneration and helpless collapse left 
untouched all the springs from which his poetry drew 
its life. 

In the autumn of 1844 Browning made a second 
tour to Italy. It was chiefly memorable for his meet- 
ing, at Leghorn, with Edward John Trelawney, to 
whom he carried a letter of introduction ; — one who 
had not only himself " seen Shelley plain," but has 
contributed more than any one else, save Hogg, to 
flash the unfading image of what he saw on the eyes 
of posterity. The journey quickened and enriched 
his Italian memories ; and left many vivid traces in 
the poetry of the following year. Among these was 
the drama of Lur'ia^ ultimately published as the con- 
cluding number of the Bells. 

In this remarkable drama Browning turned once 
more to the type of historical tragedy which he had 
originally essayed in Strafford. The fall of a man of 
passionate fidelity through the treachery of the prince 
or the people in whom he has put his trust, was for 
Browning one of the most arresting of the great tra- 
ditional motives of tragic drama. He dwelt with em- 
phasis upon this aspect of the fate of Charles's great 
minister; in Liiria^ where he was working uncon- 
trolled by historical authority, it is the fundamental 



62 BROWNING 

theme. At the same time the effect is heightened by 
those race contrasts which had been so abundantly 
used in The Return of the Druses. Luria is a Moor 
who has undertaken the service of Florence, and whose 
religion it is to serve her. Like Othello,^ he has been 
entrusted, alien as he is, by a jealous and exacting 
State, with the supreme command of her military 
forces, a position in which the fervour of the Oriental 
and the frank simplicity of the soldier inevitably lie 
open to the subtle strategy of Italians and statesmen. 
" Luria," wrote Browning, while the whole scheme 
was " all in my brain yet, . . . devotes himself to 
something he thinks Florence, and the old fortune fol- 
lows, . . . and I will soon loosen my Braccio and 
Puccio (a pale discontented man) and Tiburzio (the 
Pisan, good true fellow, this one), and Domizia the 
lady — loosen all these on dear foolish (ravishing must 
his folly be) golden-hearted Luria, all these with their 
worldly wisdom and Tuscan shrewd ways." Florence, 
in short, plays collectively somewhat the part of lago 
to this second Othello, but of an lago (need it be said) 
immeasurably less deeply rooted in malignity than 
Shakespeare's. It was a source of weakness as well 
as of strength in Browning as a dramatist that the 
evil things in men dissolve so readily under his 
scrutiny as if they were mere shells of flimsy disguise 
for the " soul of goodness " they contain. He has, in 
fact, put so much strong sense on the side of the jeal- 
ous Florentine masters of his hero that his own sym- 

' Browning himself uses this parallel in almost his first reference 
to Luria while still unwritten : Letters of R. B. and E. B. B.,\. 26. 



MATURING METHODS 63 

pathies were divided, with paralysing effect, it would 
seem, upon his interest in drama.^ Even the formida- 
ble antagonism of Braccio, the Florentine Commis- 
sary, is buttressed, if not based, upon a resolve to de- 
fend the rights of civilisation against militarism, of 
intellect against brute force. " Brute force shall not 
rule Florence." Even so, it is only after conflict and 
fluctuation that he decides to allow Luria's trial to 
take its course. Puccio, again, the former general of 
Florence, superseded by Luria, and now serving under 
his command, turns out not quite the " pale discon- 
tented man " whom Browning originally designed and 
whom such a situation was no doubt calculated to pro- 
duce. Instead of a Cassius, enviously scowling at the 
greatness of his former comrade, Caesar, we have one 
whose generous admiration for the alien set over him 
struggles hard, and not unsuccessfully, with natural 
resentment. In keeping with such company is the 
noble Pisan general, who vies with Luria in generosity 
and twice intervenes decisively to save him from the 
Florentine attack. Even Domizia, the " panther '' 
lady who comes to the camp burning for vengeance 
upon Florence for the death of her kinsmen, and 
hoping to attain it by embroiling him with the city, 
finally emerges as his lover. But in Domizia he con- 
fessedly failed. The correspondence with Miss Bar- 
rett stole the vitality from all mere imaginary women ; 
" the panther would not be tamed." Her hatred and 

^ " For me, the misfortune is, I sympathise just as much with 
these as with him, — so there can no good come of keeping this 
wild company any longer." — Feb. 26, 1845. 



64 BROWNING 

her love alike merely beat the air. With all her volu- 
bility, she is almost as little in place in the economy 
of the drama as in that of the camp; her "wild mass 
of rage " has the air of being a valued property which 
she manages and exhibits, not an impelling and con- 
suming fire. The more potent passion of Luria and 
his lieutenant Husain is more adequately rendered, 
though "the simple Moorish instinct" in them is 
made to accomplish startling feats in European sub- 
tlety. The East with its gift of " feeling " comes 
once more, as in the Druses^ into tragic contact with 
the North and its gift of " thought " ; but it is to the 
feeling East and not to thinking North that we owe 
the clear analysis and exposition of the contrast. 
Luria has indeed, like Djabal, assimilated just so much 
of European culture as makes its infusion fatal to him : 
he suffers the doom of the lesser race 

" Which when it apes the greater is foregone." 

But the noblest quality of the lesser race flashes forth 
at the close when he takes his life, not in defiance, nor 
in despair, but as a last act of passionate fidelity to 
Florence. This is conceived with a refinement of 
moral imagination too subtle perhaps for appreciation 
on the stage ; but of the tragic power and pathos of 
the conception there can be no question. Mrs. Brown- 
ing, whose eager interest accompanied this drama 
through every stage of its progress, justly dwelt upon 
its " grandeur." The busy exuberance of Browning's 
thinking was not favourable to effects which multi- 
plicity of detail tends to destroy ; but the fate of this 



MATURING METHODS 65 

son of the " lone and silent East," though utterly 
un-Shakespearean in motive, recalls, more nearly than 
anything else in Browning's dramas, the heroic tragedy 
of Shakespeare. 

Ill 

" Mere escapes of my inner power, like the light 
of a revolving lighthouse leaping out at intervals from 
a narrow chink ; " so wrote Browning in effect to Miss 
Barrett (Feb. ii, 1845) of the "scenes and song- 
scraps," of which the first instalment had appeared 
three years before as the Dramatic Lyrics. Yet it is 
just by the intermittent flashes that the lighthouse is 
identified ; and Browning's genius, as we have seen, 
was in the end to be most truly denoted by these 
" mere escapes." With a (qw notable exceptions, 
they offer little to the student of Browning's ideology ; 
they do not illustrate his theories of life, they disclose 
no good in evil and no hope in ill-success. But they 
are full of an exuberant joy in life itself, as seen by a 
keen observer exempt from its harsher conditions, to 
whom all power and passion are a feast. He watches 
the angers, the malignities of men and women, as one 
might watch the quarrels of wild beasts, not cynically, 
but with the detached, as it were professional, interest 
of a born " fighter." The loftier hatred, which is a 
form of love, — the sublime hatred of a Dante, the 
tragic hatred of a Timon, even the unforgetting, self- 
consuming hatred of a Heathcliff, — did not now, or 
ever, engage his imagination. The indignant invec- 
tive against a political renegade, "Just for a handful 



66 BROWNING 

of silver he left us," in which Browning spoke his 
own mind, is poor and uncharacteristic compared with 
pieces in which he stood aside and let some accom- 
plished devil, like the Duke in My last Duchess^ some 
clerical libertine, like the bishop of St. Praxed's, some 
sneaking reptile, like the Spanish friar, some tiger- 
hearted Regan, like the lady of The Laboratory^ or 
some poor crushed and writhing worm, like the girl 
of The Confessional^ utter their callous cynicism or 
their death-bed torment, the snarl of petty spite, the 
low fierce cry of triumphant malice, the long-drawn 
shriek of futile rage. There was commonly an ele- 
ment of unreason, extravagance, even grotesqueness, 
in the hatreds that caught his eye ; he had a relish for 
the gratuitous savagery of the lady in Timers Revenges^ 
who would calmly decree that her lover should be 
burnt in a slow fire " if that would compass her 
desire.'* He seized the grotesque side of persecution ; 
and it is not fanciful to see in the delightful chronicle 
of the Nemesis inflicted upon " Sibrandus Schafna- 
burgensis " a foretaste of the sardonic confessions of 
Instans Tyrannus. And he seized the element of sheer 
physical zest in even eager and impassioned action ; 
the tramp of the march, the swing of the gallop in 
the fiery Cavalier Tunes, the crash of Gismond's 
"back-handed blow" upon Gauthier's mouth; the 
exultant lift of the " great pace " of the riders who 
bring the Good News. 

Of love poetry, on the other hand, there was little 
in these first Lyrics and Romances. Browning had 
had warm friendships with women, and was singularly 



MATURING METHODS 67 

attractive to them ; but at thirty-three love had at 
most sent a dancing ripple across the bright surface 
of his life, and it apparently counted for nothing in 
his dreams. His plans, as he told Miss Barrett, had 
been made u^ithout any thought of " finding such a 
one as you/' That discovery introduced a new and 
unknown factor into his scheme of things. The 
love-poetry of the Dramatic Lyrics and Romances is 
still somewhat tentative and insecure. The beautiful 
fantasia In a Gondola was directly inspired by a picture 
of his friend Maclise. He paints the romance of the 
lover's twilight tryst with all his incisive vigour j but 
his own pulse beats rather with the lover who goes 
forth at daybreak, and feels the kindling summons of 
the morning glory of sea and sunlight into the " world 
of men." His attitude to women is touched with the 
virginal reserve of the young Hippolytus, whose tragic 
fate he had told in the lofty Prologue of Artemis. He 
approaches them with a kind of delicate and distant 
awe ; tender, even chivalrous, but accentuating rather 
the reserves and reticences of chivalry than its re- 
wards. The lady of The Flower's Name is beautiful, 
but her beauty is only shyly hinted ; we see no feature 
of face or form ; only the fold of her dress brushing 
against the box border, the " twinkling " of her white 
fingers among the dark leaves. The typical lover of 
these lyrics is of a temperament in which feminine 
sensitiveness and masculine tenacity are character- 
istically blended ; a temperament which the faintest 
and most fugitive signs of love — a word, a glance, the 
impalpable music of a romantic name — not only kin- 



68 BROWNING 

die and subdue, but permanently fortify and secure. 
Cristina^ Rudel and the Lost Mistress stand in a line 
of development which culminates in The Last Ride 
Together. Cristina*s lover has but " changed eyes " 
with her; but no queenly scorn of hers can undo the 
spiritual transformation which her glance has wrought : 

" Her soul's mine ; and thus, grown perfect, 
I shall pass my life's remainder." 

The Lost Mistress is an exquisitely tender and pathetic 
farewell, but not the stifled cry of a man who has re- 
ceived a crushing blow. Not easily, but yet without 
any ruinous convulsion, he makes that transition from 
love to " mere friendship " which passionate men so 
hardly endure. 

The really tragic love-story was, for Browning, the 
story not of love rejected but of love flagging, fading, 
or crushed out. 

" Never fear, but there's provision 
Of the devil's to quench knowledge 
Lest on earth we walk in rapture," 

Cristina*s lover had bitterly reflected. Courts, as the 
focusses of social artifice and ceremonial restraint, were 
for him the peculiar breeding-places of such tragedies, 
and in several of the most incisive of the Lyrics and 
Romances he appears as the champion of the love 
they menace. The hapless Last Duchess suffers for 
the largess of her kindly smiles. The duchess of 
The Flight and the lady of The Glove successfully re- 
volt against pretentious substitutes for love offered in 



MATURING METHODS 69 

love's name. The Flight is a tale, as Mrs. Browning 
said, " with a great heart in it." Both the Gipsy- 
woman whose impassioned pleading we overhear, and 
the old Huntsman who reports it, are drawn from a 
domain of rough and simple humanity not very often 
trodden by Browning. The genial retainer admirably 
mediates between the forces of the Court which he 
serves and those of the wild primitive race to which 
his world-old calling as a hunter makes him kin ; his 
hearty, untutored speech and character envelop the 
story like an atmosphere, and create a presumption 
that heart and nature will ultimately have their way. 
Even the hinted landscape-background serves as a 
mute chorus. In this " great wild country " of wide 
forests and pine-clad mountains, the court is the 
anomaly. 

Similarly, in The Glove^ the lion, so magnificently 
sketched by Browning, is made to bear out the inner 
expressiveness of the tale in a way anticipated by no 
previous teller. The lion of Schiller's ballad is 
already assuaged to his circumstances, and enters the 
arena like a courtier entering a drawing-room. 
Browning's lion, still terrible and full of the tameless 
passion for freedom, bursts in with flashing forehead, 
like the spirit of the desert of which he dreams : it is 
the irruption of this mighty embodiment of elemental 
Nature which wakens in the lady the train of feeling 
and thought that impel her daring vindication of its 
claims. 

Art was far from being as strange to the Browning 



JO BROWNING 

of 1842-45 as love. But he seized with a peculiar 
predilection those types and phases of the Art-world 
with which love has least to do. He studies the 
egoisms of artists, the vanities of connoisseurs ; the 
painter Lutwyche showing " how he can hate " ; the 
bishop of St. Praxed's piteously bargaining on his 
death-bed for the jasper and lapislazuli " which Gan- 
dolph shall not choose but see and burst " ; the duke 
of the Last Duchess displaying his wife's portrait as 
the wonder of his gallerv^, and unconcernedly disposing 
of her person. In a single poem only Browning 
touches those problems of the artist life which were 
to occupy him in the 'Fifties ; and the Pictor Ignotus 
is as far behind the Andrea del Sarto and Fra Lippo 
Lippi in intellectual force as in dramatic brilliance and 
plasticitv. Browning's sanguine and energetic tem- 
perament always inclined him to over-emphasis, and 
he has somewhat over-emphasised the anaemia of this 
anaemic soul. Rarely again did he paint in such reso- 
lute uniformity of ashen grey. The " Pictor " is the 
earliest, and the palest, of Browning's pale ascetics, 
who make, in one way or another, the great refusal, 
and lose their souls by trying to save them in a bar- 
renness which they call purity. 

The musician as such holds at this stage an even 
smaller place in Browning's art than the painter. 
None of these Lyrics foreshadows Abt Vogler and 
Hugues of Saxe-Gotha as the Pictor foreshadows Lippi 
and Del Sarto. But if he did not as yet explore the 
ways of the musical soul, he shows already a peculiar 
instinct for the poetic uses and capabilities of music. 



MATURING METHODS 



71 



He sings with peculiar entrain of the transforming 
magic of song. The thrush and cuckoo, among the 
throng of singing-birds, attract him by their musi- 
cianly qualities — the " careless rapture " repeated, the 
" minor third " which only the cuckoo knows. These 
Lyrics and Romances of 1842-45 are as full of 
tributes to the power of music as V Allegro and // 
Penseroso themselves. Orpheus, whose story Milton 
there touched so ravishingly, was too trite an instance 
to arrest Browning ; it needed perhaps the stimulus 
of his friend Leighton's picture to call forth, long af- 
terwards, the ^Qv^ choice verses on Eurydice. More 
to his mind was the legend of that motley Orpheus of 
the North, the Hamelin piper, — itself a picturesque 
motley of laughter and tears. The Gipsy's lay of 
far-off romance awakens the young duchess ; Theo- 
crite's " little human praise " wins God's ear, and 
Pippa's songs transform the hearts of men. A poet 
in this vein would fall naturally enough upon the 
Biblical story of the cure of the stricken Saul by the 
songs of the boy David. But a special influence drew 
Browning to this subject, — the wonderful Song to 
David of Christopher Smart, — " a person of impor- 
tance in his day," who owes it chiefly to Browning's 
enthusiastic advocacy of a poem he was never weary 
of declaiming, that he is a poet of importance in ours. 
Smart's David is before all things the glowing singer 
of the Joy of Earth, — the glory of the visible creation 
uttering itself in rapturous Praise of the Lord. And 
it is this David of whom we have a presentiment in 
the no less glowing songs with which Browning's 



7^ 



BROWNING 



shepherd-boy seeks to reach the darkened mind of 
Saul. 

Of the poem we now possess, only the first nine 
sections belong to the present phase of Browning's 
work. These were confessedly incomplete, but 
Browning was content to let them go forth as they 
were, and less bent upon even their ultimate comple- 
tion, it would seem, than Miss Barrett, who bade him 
" remember " that the poem was " there only as a 
first part, and that the next parts must certainly fol- 
low and complete what will be a great lyrical work — 
now remember."^ And the " next parts " when they 
came, in Men and Women^ bore the mark of his ten 
years' fellowship with her devout and ecstatic soul, as 
well as of his own growth towards the richer and fuller 
harmonies of verse. The 1845 fragment falls, of 
course, far short of its sequel in imaginative audacity 
and splendour, but it is steeped in a pellucid beauty 
which Browning's busy intellectuality was too prone 
to dissipate. Kenyon read it nightly, as he told Mrs. 
Browning, " to put his dreams in order " ; finely 
comparing it to " Homer's Shield of Achilles, thrown 
into lyrical whirl and life." And certainly, if Brown- 
ing anywhere approaches that Greek plasticity for 
which he cared so little, it is in these exquisitely 
sculptured yet breathing scenes. Then, as the young 
singer kindles to his work, his song, without becom- 
ing less transparent, grows more personal and impas- 
sioned ; he no longer repeats the familiar chants of his 
tribe, but breaks into a new impetuous inspiration of 
^ E. B. B. to R. B., Dec. 10, 1845. 



MATURING METHODS 73 

his own J the lyrical whirl and life gathers swiftness 
and energy, and the delicate bas-reliefs of Saul's peo- 
ple, in their secular pieties of grief or joy, merge in 
the ecstatic vision of Saul himself, as he had once 
been, and as he might yet be, that 

" boyhood of wonder and hope, 
Present promise and wealth of the future beyond the eye's 
scope," 

all the fulness and glory of the life of humanity 
gathered upon his single head. It is the very voice 
of life, which thrills and strikes across the spiritual 
darkness of Saul, as the coming of Hyperion scattered 
the shadows of Saturnian night. 



CHAPTER IV 

WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY. MEN AND WOMEN 

This foot, once planted on the goal ; 
This glory-garland round my soul. 

— The Last Ride Together. 

Warmer climes 
Give brighter plumage, stronger wing ; the breeze 
Of Alpine highths thou playest with, borne on 
Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where 
The Siren waits thee, singing song for song. 

— Landor. 



The Bells and Pomegranates made no very great 
way with the public, which found the matter un- 
equal and the title obscure. But both the title and 
the greater part of the single poems are linked in- 
separably with the most intimate personal relationship 
of his life. Hardly one of the Romances, as we 
saw, but had been read in MS. by Elizabeth Barrett, 
and pronounced upon with the frank yet critical de- 
light of her nature. In the abstruse symbolic title, 
too, — implying, as Browning expected his readers to 
discover, " sound and sense " or " music and discours- 
ing," — her wit had divined a more felicitous applica- 
tion to Browning's poetry — 
74 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY 75 

" Some * Pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the middle, 
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity." 

The two poets were still strangers when this was 
written ; but each had for years recognised in the 
other a new and wonderful poetic force,^ and the 
vivid words marked the profound community of spirit 
which was finally to draw them together. A few 
years later, a basket of pomegranates was handed to 
her, when travelling with her husband in France, and 
she laughingly accepted the omen. The omen was 
fulfilled ; Elizabeth Browning's poetry expanded and 
matured in the companionship of that rich-veined 
human heart; it was assuredly not by chance that 
Browning, ten years after her death, recalled her 
symbol in the name of his glorious woman-poet, 
Balaustion. 

But she, on her part, also brought a new and potent 
influence to bear upon his poetry, the only one which 
after early manhood he ever experienced ; and their 
union was by far the most signal event in Browning's 
intellectual history, as it was in his life. Her ex- 
perience up to the time when they met had been in 
most points singularly unlike his own. Though of 
somewhat higher social status, she had seen far less 
of society and of the world ; but she had gone through 
the agony of a passionately loved brother's sudden 
death, and the glory of English wood and meadow 

' She had at once discerned the " new voice " in Paracelsus^ 
1835 5 ^^"^ ^^ occasion may have been not much later (" years 
ago " in 1845) O'^ which he was all but admitted to the " shrine " 
of the " world's wonder " (i?. B. to E. B, B., Jan. 10, 1845). 



76 BROWNING 

was for her chiefly, as to Milton in his age, an 
enchanted memory of earlier days, romantically 
illuminating a darkened London chamber. " Most 
of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures," 
she said to Home, " have passed in my thoughts." 
Both were eager students, and merited the hazardous 
reputation which both incurred, of being " learned 
poets " ; but Browning wore his learning, not indeed 
" lightly, like a flower," but with the cool mastery of 
a scholarly man of the world, whose interpretation of 
books is controlled at every point by his knowledge 
of men ; while Miss Barrett's Greek and Hebrew 
chiefly served to allure an imagination naturally 
ecstatic and visionary along paths crowned with 
congenial unearthly symbols, with sublime shapes of 
gods and Titans, angels and seraphim. Then, not- 
withstanding the role of hopeless invalid which she was 
made to play, and did play with touching conviction, 
she had, it is clear, a fund of buoyant and impulsive 
vitality hardly inferior to Browning's own ; only that 
the energy which in hirri flowed out through natural 
channels had in her to create its own opportunities, 
and surged forth with harsh or startling violence, — 
sometimes "tearing open a parcel instead of untying 
it," and sometimes compelling words to serve her 
will by masterful audacities of collocation. Both 
poets stood apart from most of their contemporaries 
by a certain exuberance — " a fine excess " — quite 
foreign to the instincts of a generation which re- 
pudiated the Revolution and did its best to repudiate 
Byron. But Browning's exuberance was genial, 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY 77 

hearty, and on occasion brutal ; hers was exalted, 
impulsive, " headlong," ' intense, and often fantastic 
and quaint. His imagination flamed forth like an 
intenser sunlight, heightening and quickening all that 
was alive and alert in man and Nature ; hers shot out 
superb or lurid volcanic gleams across the simplicity 
of natural chiaroscuro, disturbing the air with con- 
flicting and incalculable effects of strange horror and 
strange loveliness. It might have been averred of 
Browning that he said everything he thought ; of her 
the truer formula would be her own, that she " took 
every means of saying " what she thought.^ There 
was something of iEschylus in her, as there was much 
of Aristophanes in him ; it was not for nothing that 
her girlish ardour had twice flung itself upon the task 
of rendering the Prometheus Bound in English ; they 
met on common ground in the human and pathetic 
Euripides. But her power was lyric, not dramatic. 
She sang from the depths of a wonderfully rich and 
passionate nature ; while he was most truly himself 
when he was personating some imaginary mind. 

Early in January, 1845, ^^^ ^^^ poets were brought 
by the genial Kenyon, her cousin and his good friend, 

1 The word her Italian tutor meant to describe her by, but could 
not pronounce it. He said she was testa lunga {^Letters of R. and 
E. B., X. 7). 

2 Letters^ R. and E. B., i, 8. Cf. her admirable letter to 
Ruskin, ten years later, apropos of the charge of " affectation." 
" To say a thing faintly, because saying it strongly sounds odd or 
obscure or unattractive for some reason to careless readers, does 
appear to me bad policy as well as bad art " (^Letters of E. B. B., 
ii. 200). 



yS BROWNING 

into actual communication, and the memorable cor- 
respondence, the most famous of its kind in English 
literature, at once began. Browning, as his way was 
in telling other men's stories, burst at once in medias 
res in this great story of his own. " I love your 
verses, my dear Miss Barrett, with all my heart," he 
assures her in the first sentence of his first letter. He 
feels them already too much a part of himself to ever 
" try and find fault," — " nothing comes of it all, — so 
into me has it gone and part of me has it become, 
this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of 
which but took root and grew." It was " living," 
like his own j it was also direct, as his own was not. 
His frank cameraderie was touched from the outset 
with a fervent, wondering admiration to which he was 
by no means prone. " You do^ what I always wanted, 
hoped to do, and only seem likely now to do for the 
first time. You speak out, you^ — I only make men 
and women speak — give you truth broken into pris- 
matic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is 
in me, but I am going to try.'' Thus the first contact 
with the " Lyric Love " of after days set vibrating the 
chords of all that was lyric and personal in Brown- 
ing's nature. His brilliant virtuosity in the person- 
ation of other minds threatened to check all simple 
utterance of his own. The " First Poem " of Robert 
Browning had yet to be written, but now, as soon as 
he had broken from his "dancing ring of men and 
women," — the Dramatic Lyrics and Romances and 
one or two outstanding dramas, — he meant to write 
it. Miss Barrett herself hardly understood until 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY 79 

much later the effect that her personality, the very 
soul that spoke in her poetry, had upon her corre- 
spondent. She revelled in the Dramatic Lyrics and 
Romances, and not least in rollicking pieces, like 
Sibrandus or The Spanish Cloister^ which appealed to 
the robust masculine humour with which this out- 
wardly fragile woman is too rarely credited. Pippa 
Passes she could find in her heart to covet the author- 
ship of, more than any of his other works — a prefer- 
ence in which he agreed. Few more brilliant ap- 
preciations of English poetry are extant than some of 
those which sped during 1845 ^^^ 1846 from the in- 
valid chamber in Harley Street to the "old room" 
looking out on the garden at New Cross. But she 
did not conceal from him that she wished him to seek 
" the other crown " also. " I do not think, with all 
that music in you, only your own personality should 
be dumb." ^ But she undoubtedly, with all her sense 
of the glory of the dramatic art, discouraged his writ- 
ing for the stage, a domain which she regarded with 
an animus curiously compounded of Puritan loathing, 
poetic scorn, and well-bred shrinking from the vul- 
garity of the green-room. And it is clear that before 
the last plays, Luria and A SouFs Tragedy^ wer^ pub- 
lished his old stage ambition had entirely vanished. 
It was not altogether hyperbole (in any case the 
hyperbole was wholly unconscious) when he spoke of 
her as a new medium to which his sight was gradually 
becoming adjusted, ^^ seeing all things^ as it does^ in 
you.''' 
^E. B. B. to R. B,, 26th May, 1846. Cf. R. B., 13th Feb., 1846. 



8o BROWNING 

She, on her part, united, as clever women in love 
so often do, with a woman's more utter self-abasement 
a larger measure of critical penetration. The " poor 
tired wandering singer," who so humbly took the 
hand of the liberal and princely giver, and who with 
perfect sincerity applied to herself his unconscious 
phrase — 

" Cloth of frieze, be not too bold 
Though thou'rt match'd with cloth of gold," 

" That, beloved, was written for me ! " ^ — shows at 
the same time the keenest insight into the qualities of 
his work. She felt in him the masculine temper and 
the masculine range, his singular union of rough and 
even burly power with subtle intellect and penetrating 
music. With the world of society and affairs she had 
other channels of communication. But no one of 
her other friends — not Orion Home, not even Kenyon 
— bridged as Browning did the gulf between the 
world of society and affairs, which she vaguely knew, 
and the romantic world of poetry in which she lived. 
If she quickened the need for lyrical utterance in 
him, he drew her, in his turn, into a closer and richer 
contact with common things. If she had her part in 
Christmas- Eve and Easter-Day^ he had his, no less, in 
Aurora Leigh. 

Twenty-one months passed between Browning's 
first letter and their marriage. The tentative ex- 
change of letters passed into a formal " contract " to 
correspond, — sudden if not as " unadvised " as the 
1 E, B. B. to R. B., 9th Jan., 1846. 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY 8 1 

love-vows of Juliet, a parallel which he shyly hinted, 
and she, with the security of the whole-hearted, boldly 
recalled. All the winter and early spring her health 
forbade a meeting, and it is clear that but for the quiet 
pressure of his will they never would have met. But 
with May came renewed vigour, and she reluctantly 
consented to a visit. " He has a way of putting 
things which I have not, a way of putting aside, — so 
he came." A few weeks later he spoke. She at first 
absolutely refused to entertain the thought ; he be- 
lieved, and was silent. But in the meantime the let- 
ters and the visits " rained down more and more," 
and the fire glowed under the surface of the writing 
and the talk, subdued but unsuppressed. Once more 
his power of " putting aside " compelled her to listen, 
and when she listened she found herself assailed at a 
point which her own exalted spirituality made her least 
able to defend, by a love more utterly self-sacrificing 
than even she had ever imagined. This man of the 
masterful will, who took no refusals, might perhaps in 
any case have finally " put aside " all obstacles to her 
consent. But when he disclosed — to her amazement, 
well as she thought she knew him — that he had asked 
the right to love her without claiming any love in re- 
turn, that when he first spoke he had believed her 
disease to be incurable, and yet preferred to be allowed 
to sit only a day at her side to the fulfilment of " the 
brightest dream which should exclude her," her re- 
sistance gave way, — and little by little, in her own 
beautiful words, she was drawn into the persuasion 
that something was left, and that she could still do 



82 BROWNING 

something for the happiness of another. In another 
sense than she intended in the great opening sonnet 
" from the Portuguese," Love, undreamt of, had come 
to her with the irresistible might of Death, and called 
her back into life by rekindling in her the languishing, 
almost extinguished, desire to live. Is it hyperbole to 
be reminded of that other world-famous rescue from 
death which Browning, twenty-five years later, was to 
tell with such infinite verve ? Browning did not need 
to imagine, but only to remember, the magnificent 
and audacious vitality of his Herakles ; he had brought 
back his own " espoused saint," like Alcestis, from 
the grave. 

But the life thus gained was, in the immediate 
future, full of problems. Browning, said Kenyon, 
was " great in everything " ; and during the year 
which followed their engagement he had occasion to 
exhibit the capacities both of the financier he had 
once declined to be, and of the diplomatist he was 
willing to become. Love had flung upon his life, as 
upon hers, a sudden splendour for which he was in no 
way prepared. " My whole scheme of life," he wrote 
to her,^ " (with its wants, material wants at least, 
closely cut down), was long ago calculated — and it 
supposed you^ the finding such an one as you, utterly 
impossible." But his schemes for a profession and 
an income were summarily cut short. Elizabeth 
Barrett peremptorily declined to countenance any 
such sacrifice of the work he was called to for any 
other. The same deep sense of what was due to 
1 R. B. to E. B. B., Sept 13, 1845. 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY 83 

him, and to his wife, sustained her through the trial 
that remained, — from the apparent degradation of 
secrecy and subterfuge which the domestic policy of 
Mr. Barrett made inevitable, to the mere physical and 
nervous strain of rising, that September morning of 
1846, from an invalid's couch to be married. That 
" peculiarity," as she gently termed it, of her father's, 
malign and cruel as it was, twice precipitated a happy 
crisis in their fortunes, which prudence might have 
postponed. His refusal to allow her to seek health in 
Italy in Oct., 1845, ^^^ brought them definitely to- 
gether; his second refusal in Aug., 1846, drove her to 
the one alternative of going there as Browning's wife. 
A week after the marriage ceremony, during which 
they never met, Mrs. Browning left her home, with 
the faithful Wilson and the indispensable Flush, en 
route for Southampton. The following day they at- 
rived in Paris. 



II 

There followed fifteen years during which the in- 
exhaustible correspondents of the last twenty months 
exchanged no further letter, for they were never 
parted. That is the sufficient outward symbol of 
their all but flawless union. After a leisurely journey 
through France, and an experimental sojourn at the 
goal of Mrs. Browning's two frustrated journeys, 
Pisa, they settled towards the close of April, 1847, ^" 
furnished apartments in Florence, moving some four 
months later into the more permanent home which 



84 BROWNING 

their presence was to render famous, the Palazzo (or 
"Casa'') Guidi, just off the Piazza Pitti. 

Their life — mirrored for us in Mrs. Browning's 
vivid and delightful letters — was, like many others, in 
which we recognise rare and precious quality, singu- 
larly wanting in obviously expressive traits. It is 
possible to describe everything that went on in the 
Browning household in terms applicable to those of 
scores of other persons of wide interest, cultivated 
tastes, and moderate but not painfully restricted 
means. All that was passionate, ideal, heroic in them 
found expression through conditions which it needs 
a fine eye to distinguish from those of easy-going 
bourgeois mediocrity. Their large and catholic hu- 
manity exempted them from much that makes for 
bold and sensational outline in the story of a career. 
Their poetic home was built upon all the philistine 
virtues. Mrs. Jameson laughed at their " miraculous 
prudence and economy " ; and Mrs. Browning herself 
laughed, a little, at her husband's punctilious rigour in 
paying his debts, — his " horror of owing five shillings 
for five days " ; Browning, a born virtuoso in what- 
ever he undertook, abhorring a neglected bill as he did 
an easy rhyme, and all other symbols of that slovenly 
Bohemia which came nearest, on the whole, to his 
conception of absolute evil. They lived at first in 
much seclusion, seeking no society, and unknown 
alike to the Italian and the English quarters of the 
Florentine world. But Arcady was, at bottom, just 
as foreign to their ways as Bohemia. " Soundless 
and stirless hermits," Mrs. Browning playfully called 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY 85 

them ; but in no house in Florence did the news of 
political and literary Europe find keener comment or 
response than in this quiet hermitage. Two long 
absences, moreover (1851-52 and 1855-56), divided 
between London and Paris, interrupted their Italian 
sojourn ; and these times were crowded with friendly 
intercourse, which they keenly enjoyed. " No place 
like Paris for living in," Browning declared after re- 
turning from its blaze to the quiet retreat of Casa 
Guidi. But both felt no less deeply the charm of 
their " dream life " within these old tapestried walls. ^ 
Nor did either, in spite of their delight in French 
poetry and their vivid interest in French politics, 
really enter the French world. They were received 
by George Sand, whose " indiscreet immortalities " 
had ravished Elizabeth Barrett in her invalid chamber 
years before ; but though she " felt the burning soul 
through all that quietness," and through the " crowds 
of ill-bred men who adore her a genoux bas^ betwixt a 
pufF of smoke and an ejection of saliva," — they both 
felt that she did not care for them. Dumas, another 
admiration, they did not see ; an introduction to 
Hugo, Browning carried about for years but had no 
chance of presenting ; Beranger they saw in the 
street, and regretted the absence of an intermediator. 
Balzac, to their grief, was just dead. A complete set 
of his works was one of their Florentine ambitions. 
One memorable intimacy was formed, however, 
during the Paris winter of 1851-52; for it was now 
that he first met Joseph Milsand, his warm friend 
^Letters of E. B. B., ii. 199. 



86 BROWNING 

until Milsand's death in 1886, and probably, for the 
last twenty years at least, the most beloved of all his 
friends, as he was at all times one of his shrewdest 
yet kindliest critics. Their summer visits to London 
(1851, 1852, 1855, 1856) brought them much more 
of intimate personal converse, tempered, however, 
inevitably, in a yet greater proportion, by pain, dis- 
comfort, and fatigue. Of himself, yet more than of 
the Laureate, might have been used the phrase in 
which he was to dedicate a later poem to Tennyson — 
" noble and sincere in friendship." The visitors who 
gathered about him in these London visits included 
friends who belonged to every phase and aspect of his 
career — from his old master and mentor. Fox, and 
Kenyon, the first begetter of his wedded happiness, 
to Dante Rossetti, his first and, for years to come, 
solitary disciple, and William Allingham, whom Ros- 
setti introduced. Among his own contemporaries 
they were especially intimate with Tennyson, — the 
sterling and masculine " Alfred " of Carlyle, whom 
the world first learnt to know from his biography ; 
and with Carlyle himself, a more genial and kindly 
Carlyle than most others had the gift of evoking, and 
whom his biographers mostly efface. 

After their return from the second journey to the 
north their Italian life lost much of its dream-like 
seclusion. The publication of Men and Women 
(1855) and Aurora Leigh (1856) drew new visitors to 
the salon in Casa Guidi, and after 1853 ^^^7 repeat- 
edly wintered in Rome, mingling freely in its more 
cosmopolitan society, and, on occasion, in the gaieties 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY Sj 

of the Carnival. To the end, however, their Roman 
circle was more American than English. " Is Mr. 
Browning an American ? " asked an English lady of 
the American ambassador. " Is it possible that you 
ask me that ? " came the prompt and crushing retort ; 
" why, there is not a village in the United States so 
small that they could not tell you that Robert Brown- 
ing is an Englishman, and they wish he were an 
American." Spiritualism, in the main an American 
institution, became during the later years a centre of 
fervid interest to the one and an irritant to the other. 
One turns gladly from that episode to their noble and 
helpful friendship for a magnificent old dying lion, 
with whom, as every one else discovered, it was ill to 
play — Walter Savage Landor. Here it was the wife 
who looked on with critical though kindly sarcasm at 
what she thought her husband's generous excess of 
confidence. Of all these intimacies and relationships, 
however, the poetry of these years discloses hardly a 
glimpse. His actual dealings with men and women 
called out all his genial energies of heart and brain, 
but — with one momentous exception — they did not 
touch his imagination. 



Ill 

Almost as faint as these echoes of personal friend- 
ship are those of the absorbing public interest of these 
years, the long agony, fitfully relieved by spells of 
desperate and untimely hope, of the Italian struggle 



88 BROWNING 

for liberty. The Brownings arrived in Florence dur- 
ing the lull which preceded the great outbreak of 1848. 
From the historic "windows of Casa Guidi " they 
looked forth upon the gentle futilities of the Tuscan 
revolution, the nine days' fight for Milan, the heroic 
adventure of Savoy, and the apparently final collapse 
of all these high endeavours on the field of Novara. 
Ten years of petty despotism on the one side, of " a 
unanimity of despair " on the other, followed ; and 
then the monotonous tragedy seemed to break sud- 
denly into romance, as the Emperor, '' deep and cold," 
marched his armies over the Alps for the Deliverance 
of Italy. 

Of all this the Brownings were deeply moved spec- 
tators. Browning shared his wife's sympathy with the 
Italians and her abhorrence of Austria, and it is not 
likely that he uttered either sentiment with less 
vivacity and emphasis, though much less of his talk is 
on record. " ' How long, O Lord, how long ! ' 
Robert kept saying." But he had not her passionate 
admiration for PVance, still less her faith in the Presi- 
dent-Emperor. His less lyric temperament did not so 
readily harbour unqualified emotion as hers. His 
judgment of character was cooler, and with all his 
proverbial readiness as a poet to provide men of 
equivocal conduct with hypothetical backgrounds of 
lofty or blameless motive, he was in practice as ex- 
empt from amiable illusions as he was from narrow 
spite. Himself the most exact and precise in his 
dealings with the world, he could pardon the excesses 
and irregularities of a great nature ; but sordid self- 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY 89 

seeking under the mask of high ideals revolted him. 
He laughed at the boyish freaks of Landor's magnifi- 
cent old age, which irritated even his large-hearted 
wife ; but he could not forgive Louis Napoleon the 
coup d^etat^ and when the liberation of Lombardy was 
followed by the annexation of Savoy and Nice, the 
Emperor's devoted defender had to listen, without the 
power of effective retort, to his biting summary of the 
situation : " It was a great action ; but he has taken 
eighteenpence for it, which is a pity." 

A dozen years later Louis Napoleon's equivocal 
character and career were to be subjected by Brown- 
ing to a still more equivocal exposition. But this 
sordid trait brought him within a category of " soul " 
upon which Browning did not yet, in these glowing 
years, readily lavish his art. A poem upon Napoleon, 
which had occupied him much during the winter of 
1859 (^^- riote, p. 165 below), was abandoned. 
" Blougram's " splendid and genial duplicity already 
attracted him, but the analysis of the meretricious 
figure of Napoleon became a congenial problem only 
to that later Browning of the 'Sixties and 'Seventies 
who was to explore the shady souls of a Guido, a 
Miranda, and a Sludge. On the other hand, deeply 
as he felt the sorrows of Italy, it was no part of his 
poetic mission to sing them. The voice of a great 
community wakened no lyric note in him, nor did his 
anger on its behalf break into dithyrambs. Nation- 
ality was not an effectual motive with him. He felt 
as keenly as his wife, or as Shelley ; but his feeling 
broke out in fitful allusion or sardonic jest in the De 



90 BROWNING 

Gustibus or the Old Pictures — not in a Casa Guid'i 
Windows^ or Songs before Congress^ an Ode to Naples^ 
or a Hellas. An " Ode " containing, by his own ac- 
count, fierce things about England, he destroyed after 
Villafranca. It is only in subtle and original varia- 
tions that we faintly recognise the broad simple theme 
of Italy's struggle for deliverance. The Patriot and 
Instans Tyramius both have a kind of nexus with the 
place and time \ but the one is a caustic satire on 
popular fickleness and the other a sardonically humor- 
ous travesty of persecution. Italy is mentioned in 
neither. Both are far removed from the vivid and 
sympathetic reflection of the national struggle which 
thrills us in The Italian in England and the third scene 
of Pippa Passes. This " tyrant " has nothing to do 
with the Austrian whom Luigi was so eager to assas- 
sinate, or any other : whatever in him belongs to his- 
tory has been permeated through and through with the 
poet's derisive irony ; he is despotism stripped of the 
passionate conviction which may lend it weight and 
political significance, reduced to a kind of sport, like 
the chase of a butterfly, and contemplating its own 
fantastic tricks with subdued amusement. 



IV 

The great political drama enacted in Italy during 
the Brownings' residence there, thus scarcely stirred 
the deeper currents of Browning's imagination, any 
more than, for all the vivid and passionate eloquence 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY 9I 

she poured forth in its name, it really touched the 
genius of his wife. The spell of Italian scenery was 
less easily evaded than the abstractions of politics by 
a poet of his keen sensibility to light and colour. 
And the years of his Italian sojourn certainly left pal- 
pable traces, not only, as is obvious, upon the land- 
scape background which glows behind his human fig- 
ures, but on his way of conceiving and rendering the 
whole relation between Nature and Man. They did 
not, indeed, make him in any sense a Nature poet. 
In that very song of delight in " Italy, my Italy," 
which tells how the things he best loves in the world are 

" a castle precipice-encurled 
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine," 

or some old palazzo, with a pointed cypress to guard 
it, by the opaque blue breadth of summer sea, the joy 
in mountain and sea is subtly reinforced at everv point 
by the play of human interest ; there are frescoes on 
the crumbling walls, and a barefooted girl tumbles 
melons on the pavement with news that the king has 
been shot at ; art and politics asserting their place be- 
side Nature in the heart of Italy's " old lover." And 
in the actual life of the Brownings "Nature" had to 
be content, as a rule, with the humbler share. Their 
chosen abode was not a castle in the Apennines or an 
old crumbling house by the southern sea, but an 
apartment commanding the crowded streets of Flor- 
ence ; and their principal absences from it were spent 
in Rome, in London, or in the yet more congenial 
" blaze of Paris." They delighted certainly to escape 



92 BROWNING 

into the forest uplands. " Robert and I go out and 
lose ourselves in the woods and mountains, and sit by 
the waterfalls on the starry and moonlit nights," she 
wrote from their high perch above Lucca in 1849; 
but their adventures in this kind were on the whole 
like the noon-disport of the amphibian swimmer in 
Fifine^ — they always admitted of an easy retreat to the 
terra jirma of civilisation, — 

" Land the solid and safe 

To welcome again (confess !) 
When, high and dry, we chafe 
The body, and don the dress," 

The Nature Browning knew and loved was well 
within sight of humanity, and it was commonly 
brought nearer by some intrusive vestiges of man's 
work J the crescent moon drifting in the purple twi- 
light, or " lamping " between the cypresses, is seen 
over Fiesole or Samminiato ; the " Alpine gorge " 
above Lucca has its ruined chapel and its mill; the 
Roman Campagna has its tombs — " Rome's ghost since 
her decease " ; the Etrurian hill-fastnesses have their 
crowning cities " crowded with culture." He had 
always had an alert eye for the elements of human 
suggestion in landscape. But his rendering of land- 
scape before the Italian period was habitually that of 
a brilliant, graphic, but not deeply interested artist, 
wielding an incisive pencil and an opulent brush, fas- 
tening upon every bit of individual detail, and some- 
times, as in the admirable Englishman in Italy^ recall- 
ing Wordsworth's indignant reproof of the great fel- 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY 93 

low-artist — Scott — who " made an inventory of Na- 
ture's charms." This hard objective brilliance does 
not altogether disappear from the work of his Italian 
period. But it tends to give way to a strangely subtle 
interpenetration of the visible scene with the passion 
of the seeing soul. Nature is not more alive, but her 
life thrills and palpitates in subtler relation with the 
life of man. The author of Men and Women is a 
greater poet of Nature than the author of the Lyrics 
and Romances^ because he is, also, a greater poet of 
" Soul " ; for his larger command of soul-life embraces 
just those moods of spiritual passion which beget the 
irradiated and transfigured Nature for which, since 
Wordsworth, poetry has continually striven to find 
expression. Browning's subtler feeling for Nature 
sprang from his profounder insight into love. Love 
was his way of approach, as it was eminently not 
Wordsworth's, to the transfigured Nature which 
Wordsworth first disclosed. It is habitually lovers 
who have these visions, — all that was mystical in 
Browning's mind attaching itself, in fact, in some way 
to his ideas of love. To the Two in the Campagna 
its primeval silence grows instinct with passion, and 
its peace with joy, — the joy of illimitable space and 
freedom, alluring yet mocking the finite heart that 
yearns. To the lovers of the Alpine gorge the old 
woods, heaped and dim, that hung over their troth- 
plighting, mysteriously drew them together ; the mo- 
ment that broke down the bar between soul and soul 
also breaking down, as it were, the bar between man 
and nature : 



94 BROWNING 

" The forests had done it ; there they stood ; 

We caught for a moment the powers at play : 
They had mingled us so, for once and good. 

Their work was done, we might go or stay. 
They relapsed to their ancient mood." 

Such " moments " were, in fact, for Browning as well 
as for his lovers, rare and fitful exceptions to the gen- 
eral nonchalance of Nature towards human affairs. 
The powers did good, as they did evil, " at play " ; 
intervening with a kind of cynical or ironical detach- 
ment (like Jaques plighting Touchstone and Audrey) 
in an alien affair of hearts. A certain eerie playful- 
ness is indeed a recurring trait in Browning's highly 
individual feeling about Nature ; the uncanny playful- 
ness of a wild creature of boundless might only half 
intelligible to man, which man contemplates with 
mingled joy, wonder, and fear. Joy, when the brown 
old Earth wears her good gigantic smile, on an au- 
tumn morning ; wonder, when he watches the " mira- 
cles wrought in play " in the teeming life of the 
Campagna ; fear, when, on a hot August midnight, 
Earth tosses stormily on her couch. And all these 
notes of feelings are struck, with an intensity and a 
boldness of invention which make it unique among 
his writings, in the great romantic legend of Childe 
Roland. What the Ancient Mariner is in the poetry 
of the mysterious terrors and splendours of the sea, 
that Childe Roland is in the poetry of bodeful horror, 
of haunted desolation, of waste and plague, ragged 
distortion, and rotting ugliness in landscape. The 
Childe, like the Mariner, advances through an atmos- 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY 95 

phere and scenery of steadily gathering menace ; the 
" starved ignoble " Nature, " peevish and dejected " 
among her scrub of thistle and dock, grows malignant ; 
to the barren waste succeed the spiteful little river 
with its drenched despairing willows, the blood-tram- 
pled mire and wrecked torture-engine, the poisonous 
herbage and palsied oak, and finally the mountains, 
ignoble as the plain — " mere ugly heights and heaps," 
ranged round the deadly den of the Dark Tower. 
But Browning's horror-world differs from Coleridge's 
in the pervading sense that the powers which control 
its issues are " at play." The catastrophe is not the 
less tragic for that ; but the heroic knight is not a 
culprit who has provoked the vengeance of his pur- 
suers, but a quarry whose course they follow with 
grim half-suppressed laughter as he speeds into the 
trap. The hoary cripple cannot hide his malicious 
glee, the " stiff blind horse " is as grotesque as he is 
woeful, the dreary day itself, as it sinks, shoots one 
grim red leer at the doomed knight as he sets forth ; 
in the penury and inertness of the wasted plain he 
sees "grimace"; the mountains fight like bulls or 
doze like dotards ; and the Dark Tower itself is 
" round and squat," built of brown stone, a mere anti- 
climax to romance ; while round it lie the sportsmen 
assembled to see the end — . 

" The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay 
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay." 



96 BROWNING 

V 

But the scenery of Italy, with all its appeals of 
picturesque outline and glowing colour, interested 
Browning less than its painting, sculpture, and music. 
'' Nature I loved, and after Nature, Art," Landor 
declared in one of his stately epitaphs on himself; 
Browning would, in this sense of the terms at least, 
have inverted their order. Casa Guidi windows com- 
manded a view, not only of revolutionary throngs, 
but of the facade of the Pitti — a fact of at least equal 
significance. From the days of his boyish pilgrimages 
to the Dulwich Gallery across the Camberwell mead- 
ows, he had been an eager student and critic of paint- 
ing ; curious, too, if not yet expert in all the processes 
and technicalities of the studio. He judged pictures 
with the eye of a skilful draughtsman ; and two rapid 
journeys had given him some knowledge of the Italian 
galleries. Continuous residence among the chief 
glories of the brush and chisel did not merely multi- 
ply artistic incitement and appeal ; it brought the 
whole world of art into more vital touch with his 
imaginative activity. It would be hard to say that 
there is any definite change in his view of art, but its 
problems grow more alluring to him, and its images 
more readily waylay and capture his passing thought. 
The artist as such becomes a more dominant figure 
in his hierarchy of spiritual workers ; while Browning 
himself betrays a new self-consciousness of his own 
function as an artist in verse ; conceiving, for in- 
stance, his consummate address to his wife as an artist's 
way of solving a perplexity which only an artist could 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY 97 

feel, that of finding unique expression for the unique 
love. 

" He who works in fresco, steals a hair-brush, 
Curbs the liberal hand, subservient proudly, 
Cramps his spirit, crowds its all in little, 
Makes a strange art of an art familiar. 
Fills his lady's missal-marge with flowerets ; 
He who blows thro' bronze may breathe thro' silver, 
Fitly serenade a slumbrous princess ; 
He who writes may w^rite for once, as I do." 

Browning is distinguished among the poets to whom 
art meant much by the prominence with him ot the 
specifically artist's point of view. He cared for pic- 
tures, or for music, certainly, as clues to the interpre- 
tation of human life, hints of" the absolute truth of 
things " which the sensible world veils and the senses 
miss. But he cared for them also, and yet more, as 
expressions of the artist's own " love of loving, rage 
of knowing, seeing, feeling " that absolute truth. And 
he cared for them also and not less, without regard to 
anything they expressed, as simple outflows of vitality, 
however grotesque or capricious. His own eye and 
ear continually provoked his hand to artistic experi- 
ments and activities. During the last years in Italy 
his passion for modelling even threatened to divert 
him from poetry ; and his wife playfully lamented 
that the " poor lost soul " produced only casts, which 
he broke on completion, and no more Men and 
Women. And his own taste in art drew him, no- 
toriously, to work in which the striving hand was 
palpable, — whether it was a triumphant tour de force 



98 BROWNING 

like Cellini's Perseus, in the Loggia — their daily ban- 
quet in the early days at Florence ; or the half-articu- 
late utterances of " the Tuscan's early art," like those 
" Pre-Giotto pictures " which surrounded them in the 
salon of Casa Guidi, " quieting " them if they were 
over busy, as Mrs. Browning beautifully says,^ more 
perhaps in her own spirit than in her husband's. 

Almost all Browning's finest poems of painting be- 
long to these Italian years, and were enshrined in Men 
and Women. They all illustrate more or less his 
characteristic preoccupation with the artist's point of 
view, and also, what is new, the point of view of par- 
ticular and historical artists, — a Guercino, an Andrea 
del Sarto, a Giotto, a Lippo Lippi. Even where he 
seems to write under the peculiar spell of his wife, as 
in the Guardian Angel.^ this trait asserts itself. They 
had spent three glowing August days of 1848 at 
Fano, and thrice visited the painting by Guercino 
there, — " to drink its beauty to our soul's content." 
Mrs. Browning wrote of the " divine " picture. 
Browning entered, with a sympathy perhaps the more 
intimate that his own " angel " was with him, and the 
memory of an old friend peculiarly near, into sympathy 
with the guardian angel ; but with one of his abrupt 
turns he passes into the world of the studio, telling us 
how he has written for the sake of " dear Guercino's 
fame," because he " did not work thus earnestly at 
all times, and has endured some wrong." With all 
this, however, the Guardian Angel is one of the few 
pieces left by Browning which do not instantly dis- 
» Letters of E. B. B., ii. 199. 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY 99 

cover themselves as his. His typical children are 
well-springs of spiritual influence, scattering the aerial 
dew of quickening song upon a withered world, or 
taking God's ear with their " little human praise." 
The spirituality of this child is of a different temper, 
— the submissive " lamblike " temper which is fulfilled 
in quiescence and disturbed by thought. 

What is here a mere flash of good-natured cham- 
pionship becomes in the great monologue of Andrea 
del Sarto an illuminating compassion. Compassion, 
be it noted, far less for the husband of an unfaithful 
wife than for the great painter whose genius was 
tethered to a soulless mate. The situation appealed 
profoundly to Browning, and Andrea's monologue is 
one of his most consummate pieces of dramatic char- 
acterisation. It is a study of spiritual paralysis, 
achieved without the least resort to the rhetorical con- 
ventions which permit poetry to express men's silence 
with speech and their apathy with song. Tennyson's 
Lotos-eaters chant their world-weariness in choral 
strains of almost too magnificent afflatus to be dra- 
matically proper on the lips of spirits so resigned. 
Andrea's spiritual lotus-eating has paralysed the nerve 
of passion in him, and made him impotent to utter the 
lyrical cry which his fate seems to crave. He is half 
" incapable of his own distress " ; his strongest emo- 
tions are a flitting hope or a momentary pang, quickly 
dissolved into the ground-tone of mournful yet serene 
contemplation, which seems to float ghostlike in the 
void between grief and joy. Reproach turns to grate- 
ful acquiescence on his lips ; the sting of blighted 



't.»;c. 



100 BROWNING 

genius is instantly annulled by the momentary en- 
chantment of her smile, whose worth he knows too 
well and remembers too soon : — 

" And you smile indeed ! 
This hour has been an hour ! Another smile ? 
If you would sit thus by me every night 
I should work better, do you comprehend ? 
I mean that I should earn more, give you more." 

The tragedy is for us, not for him : he regrets little, 
and would change still less. The " silver-grey " 
lights of dreamy autumn eve were never with more 
delicate insight rendered in terms of soul. 

Suddenly these autumnal half-tones give way to 
the flash of torches in the fragrant darkness of an 
Italian night. There is a scurry of feet along a dark 
alley, a scuffle at the end, and the genial rotundity of 
Brother Lippo Lippi's face, impudent, brilliant, in- 
suppressible, leers into the torchlight. Fra Lippo 
Lippi is not less true and vivacious than the Andrea^ 
if less striking as an example of Browning's dramatic 
power. Sarto is a great poetic creation ; Browning's 
own robust temperament provided hardly any aid in 
delineating the emaciated soul whose gifts had thinned 
down to a morbid perfection of technique. But this 
vigorous human creature, with the teeming brain, and 
the realist eye, and the incorrigible ineptitude for the 
restraints of an insincere clerical or other idealism, 
was a being to which Browning's heart went out; 
and he even makes him the mouthpiece of literary 
ideas, which his own portrait as here drawn aptly 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY lOI 

exemplifies. There is not much " soul " in Lippo, 
but he has the hearty grasp of common things, of 
the world in its business and its labour and its sport 
and its joys, which "edifies " men more than artificial 
idealities designed expressly to " beat nature." He 
" lends his mind out " and finds the answering mind 
in other men instead of imposing one from with- 
out : — 

« This world's no blot for us. 
Nor blank ; it means intensely, and means good : 
To find its meaning is my meat and drink." 

" Ay, but," objects the Prior, " you do not instigate to 
prayer ! " And it is the prior and his system which 
for Lippi stand in the place of Andrea's soulless wife. 
Lucrezia's illusive beauty lured his soul to its doom ; 
and Lippo, forced, as a child of eight, to renounce 
the world and put on the cassock he habitually dis- 
graced, triumphantly cast ofF the incubus of a sham 
spirituality which only tended to obscure what was 
most spiritual in himself. He was fortunate in the 
poet who has drawn his portrait so superbly in his 
sitter's own style. 

These two monologues belong to the most finished 
achievements of Browning. But we should miss 
much of the peculiar quality of his mind, as well as 
a vivid glimpse into the hope-and-fear-laden atmos- 
phere of Tuscany in the early 'Fifties, if we had not 
that quaint heterogeneous causerie called Old Pictures 
in Florence. There is passion in its grotesqueness 
and method in its incoherence ; for the old painters, 



102 BROWNING 

whose apologies he is ostensibly writing, with their 
imperfect achievement and their insuppressible 
idealism, sounded a congenial note to men whose 
eyes were bent incessantly upon the horizon wait- 
ing for the invisible to come into play, and Florence 
looked for her completion as Giotto's unfinished 
campanile for its spire. 

If Italy deepened Browning's hold upon the 
problems of painting, it witnessed the beginnings 
of his equally characteristic achievement in the 
kindred poetry of music. Not that his Italian life 
can have brought any notable access of musical 
impressions to a man who had grown up within 
easy reach of London concerts and operas. But 
England was a land in which music was performed ; 
Italy was a land in which it was made. Verdi's 
" worst opera " could be heard in many places ; but 
in Florence the knowing spectator might see Verdi 
himself, at its close, 

" Look through all the roaring and the wreaths 
"Where sits Rossini patient in his stall." 

Italian music, with its facile melody and its relative 
poverty of ideas, could not find so full a response in 
Browning's nature as Italian painting. It had had its 
own gracious and tender youth ; and Palestrina, 
whom he contrasts with the mountainous fuguists 
of " Saxe-Gotha " and elsewhere, probably had for 
him the same kind of charm as the early painters of 
Florence. Out of that " infancy," however, there 
had arisen no " titanically infantine" Michelangelo, 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY IO3 

but a race of accomplished petits maitres^ whose char- 
acteristic achievement was the opera of the rococo 
age. A Goldsmith or a Sterne can make the light 
songs of their contemporaries eloquent even to us of 
gracious amenities and cultivated charm ; but Brown- 
ing, with the eternal April in his heart and brain, 
heard in the stately measures it danced to, only the 
eloquence of a dirge, penetrated with the sense of the 
mortality of such joy as theirs. Byron had sung 
gaily of the gaieties of Venice ; but the vivacious 
swing of Beppo was less to Browning's mind than 
the " cold music " of Baldassare Galuppi, who made 
his world dance to the strains of its own requiem, 
and fall upon dreamy suggestions of decay in the very 
climax of the feast : — 

" What ? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, 

sigh on sigh. 
Told them something ? Those suspensions, those solutions 

— < Must we die ? ' 
Those commiserating sevenths — < Life might last ! We can but 

try ! ' " 

The musician himself has no such illusion; but his 
music is only a more bitter echo : — 

"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice 

earned : 
The soul, doubtless, is immortal — where a soul can be discerned." 

And so the poet, in the self-consciousness of his 
immense vitality, sweeps into the limbo of oblivion 
these dusty debris of the past, with no nearer approach 



104 BROWNING 

to the romantic regret of a Malory for the glories of 
old time or to Villon's awestruck contemplation of the 
mysterious evanishment of storied beauty, than the 
half-contemptuous echo — 

" ' Dust and ashes ! ' So you creak it, and I want the heart to 

scold. 
Dear dead women, with such hair too — what's become of all the 

gold 
Used to hang and brush their bosoms ? I feel chilly and grown 

old." 

In the other music-poem of the Italian time it is 
not difficult to detect a kindred mood beneath the 
half-disguise of rollicking rhymes and whimsical com- 
parisons. Once more Browning seems preoccupied 
with that in music which lends expression to a soul- 
less animation, a futile and aimless vivacity. Only 
here it is the vivacity of the schools, not of the ball- 
room. Yet some lines seem a very echo of that hol- 
low joyless mirth, for ever revolving on itself: — 

" Est fuga, volvitur rota ; 

On we drift : where looms the dim port ? " 

The intertwining and conflicting melodies of the fugue 
echo the impotent strife of jangling tongues, "affirm- 
ing, denying, holding, risposting, subjoining," — the 
shuttle play of comment and gloze shrouding the light 
of nature and truth : — 

" Over our heads truth and nature — 

Still our life's zigzags and dodges, 
Ins and outs, weaving a new legislature — 

God's gold just shining its last where that lodges. 
Palled beneath man's usurpature." 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY IO5 

But Browning was at heart too alive to the charm of 
this shuttle-play, of these zigzags and dodges, — of zig- 
zags and dodges of every kind, — not to feel the irony of 
the attack upon this " stringing of Nature through cob- 
webs " ; when the organist breaks out, as the fugue's 
intricacy grows, " But where's music, the dickens ? " 
we hear Browning mocking the indignant inquiries of 
similar purport so often raised by his readers. Master 
Hugues could only have been written by one who, with 
a childlike purity of vision for truth and nature, for the 
shining of " God's gold " and the glimpses of the 
"earnest eye of heaven," had also a keen perception 
and instinctive delight in every filament of the web of 
human " legislature." 

This double aspect of Browning's poetic nature is 
vividly reflected in the memorable essay on Shelley 
which he wrote at Paris in 185 1, as an introduction to 
a series of letters since shown to have been forged. 
The essay — unfortunately not included in his Works — 
is a document of first-rate importance for the mind of 
Browning in the midst of his greatest time ; it is also 
by far the finest appreciation of Shelley which had yet 
appeared. He saw in Shelley one who, visionary and 
subjective as he was, had solved the problem which 
confronts every idealist who seeks to grasp the visible 
world in its concrete actuality. To Browning himself 
that problem presented itself in a form which tasked 
far more severely the resources of poetic imagination, 
in proportion as actuality bodied itself forth to his alert 
senses in more despotic grossness and strength. Shel- 
ley is commonly thought to have evaded this task 



I06 BROWNING 

altogether, — building his dream-world of cloud and 
cavern loveliness remote from anything we know. It 
is Browning, the most " actual " of poets, who in- 
sisted, half a century ago, on the " practicality " of 
Shelley, — insisted, as it is even now not superfluous to 
insist, on the fearless and direct energy with which he 
strove to root his intuitions in experience. " His 
noblest and predominating characteristic," he urges, to 
quote these significant words once more, " is his 
simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the 
absolute, and of Beauty and Good in the concrete, 
while he throws, from his poet's station between both, 
swifter, subtler, and more numerous films for the con- 
nection of each with each than have been thrown by 
any modern artificer of whom I have knowledge ; 
proving how, as he says — 

" < The spirit of the worm beneath the sod 

In love and worship blends itself with God.' " 

Browning has nowhere else expounded so fully his 
ideas about the aims of his own art. It lay in the 
peculiar " dramatic " quality of his mind to express 
himself freely only in situations not his own. Hence, 
while he does not altogether avoid the poet as a char- 
acter, his poets are drawn with a curious externality 
and detachment. It is in his musicians, his painters, 
his grammarians, that the heart and passion of Brown- 
ing the poet really live. He is the poet of musicians 
and of painters, the poet of lawyers and physicians 
and Rabbis, and of scores of callings which never had 
a poet before ; but he is not the poets' poet. In the 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY IO7 

Transcendentalism^ however, after tilting with gay irony 
at the fault of over-much argument in poetry, which 
the world ascribed to his own, he fixes in a splendid 
image the magic which it fitfully yet consummately 
illustrates. The reading public which entertained any 
opinion about him at all was inclined to take him for 
another Boehme, " with a tougher book and subtler 
meanings of what roses say." A few knew that 
they had to deal, not less, with a " stout Mage like 
him of Halberstadt," who 

« with a < look you ' vents a brace of rhymes, 
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, 
Over us, under, round us every side." 

The portrait of the poet of Valladolid, on the other 
hand {How it Strikes a Contemporary)^ is not so much 
a study of a poet as of popular misconception and 
obtuseness. A grotesquely idle legend of the habits 
of the " Corregidor" flourishes among the good folks 
of Valladolid ; the speaker himself, who desires to do 
him justice, is a plain, shrewd, but unimaginative ob- 
server (" I never wrote a line of verse, did you ? "), 
and makes us acquainted with everything but the in- 
ner nature of the man. We see the corregidor in the 
streets, in his chamber, at his frugal supper and "de- 
cent cribbage " with his maid, but never at his verse. 
We see the alert objective eye of this man with the 
"scrutinising hat," who 

" stood and watched the cobbler at his trade, . . . 
If any beat a horse, you felt he saw, 
If any cursed a woman, he took note," — 



I08 BROWNING 

and all this, for Browning, went to the making of the 
poet, but we get no inkling of the process itself. 
Browning had, in his obscure as in his famous days, 
peculiar opportunities of measuring the perversities of 
popular repute. Later on, in the heyday of his re- 
nown, he chaffed its critical dispensers in his most 
uproarious vein in Pacchiarotto. The Popularity stan- 
zas present us with a theory of it conveyed in that 
familiar manner of mingled poetry and grotesqueness 
which was one of the obstacles to his own. 

There is, however, among these fifty men and 
women one true and sublime poet, — the dying 
" Grammarian," who applies the alchemy of a lofty 
imagination to the dry business of verbal erudition. 

" He said, ♦ What's time ? Leave Now for dogs and apes ! 
Man has Forever.' " 

This is one of the half-dozen lyrics which enshrine 
in noble and absolutely individual form the central 
core of Browning's passion and thought. Even the 
verse, with its sequence of smooth-flowing iambics 
broken by the leap of the dactyl, and the difficult 
double rhyme, sustains the mood of victorious but not 
lightly won serenity of soul — " too full for sound and 
foam." It is, among songs over the dead, what Rahhi 
hen E'zrci and Prospice are among the songs which face 
and grapple with death ; the fittest requiem to follow 
such deaths as those. Like Ben Ezra, the Gram- 
marian "trusts death," and stakes his life on the 
trust : — 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY IO9 

" He ventured neck or nothing — heaven's success 
Found, or earth's failure : 
< Wilt thou trust death or not ? ' lie answered, ' Yes : 
Hence with life's pale lure ! ' " 

To ordinary eyes he spends his days grovelling among 
the dust and dregs of erudition ; but it is the grovelling 
of a builder at work upon a fabric so colossally 
planned that life is fitly spent in laying the founda- 
tions. He was made in the large mould of the gods, 
— born with " thy face and throat, Lyric Apollo," — 
and the disease which crippled and silenced him in 
middle life could only alter the tasks on which he 
wreaked his mind. And now that he is dead, he 
passes, as by right, to the fellowship of the universe — 
of the sublime things of nature. 

" Here — here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, 

Lightnings are loosened. 
Stars come and go ! Let joy break with the storm, 

Peace let the dew send ! 
Lofty designs must close in like effects : 

Loftily lying, 
Leave him — still loftier than the world suspects. 

Living and dying." 

VI 

The Grammarian's Funeral achieves, in the terms 
and with the resources of Browning's art, the problem 
of which he saw the consummate master in Shelley, 
— that of throwing " films " for the connexion of 
Power and Love in the abstract with Beauty and 
Good in the concrete, and finding a link between the 
lowliest service or worship and the spirit of God. 



no BROWNING 



Such a conception of a poet's crowning glory implied 
a peculiarly close relation in Browning's view be- 
tween poetry and religion, and in particular with the 
religion which, above all others, glorified the lowly. 
Here lay, in short, the supreme worth for him of the 
Christian idea. " The revelation of God in Christ " 
was for him the consummate example of that union 
of divine love with the world — " through all the web 
of Being blindly wove" — which Shelley had contem- 
plated in the radiant glow of his poetry ; accepted by 
the reason, as he wrote a few years later, it solved 
" all problems in the earth and out of it." To that 
solution Shelley seemed to Browning to be on the 
way, and his incomplete grasp of it appealed to him 
more powerfully than did the elaborate dogmatisms 
professedly based upon it. Shelley had mistaken 
" Churchdom " for Christianity ; but he was on the 
way. Browning was convinced, to become a Christian 
himself. " I shall say what I think, — had Shelley 
lived he would have finally ranged himself with the 
Christians." 

This emphatic declaration is of great importance for 
Browning's intellectual history. He may have over- 
looked the immense barriers which must have always 
divided Shelley from the Christian world of his time ; 
he may have overlooked also that the Christian 
thought of our time has in some important points 
" ranged itself with " Shelley ; so that the Christianity 
which he might finally have adopted would have been 
sufficiently unlike that which he assailed. But it is 
clear that for Browning himself the essence of Chris- 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY III 

tianity lay at this time in something not very remote 
from what he revered as the essence of Shelleyism — 
a corollary, as it were, ultimately implicit in his 
thought. 

It was thus a deeper poetical rather than a religious 
or doctrinal interest which drew Browning m these 
Italian years, again and again to seek his revealing 
experiences of souls amid the eddies and convulsions, 
the exultations and the agonies, brought into the world 
by the amazing " revelation of God in Christ." It is 
true that we nowhere approach this focus of interest, 
that we have no glimpse, through Browning's art, how 
that " revelation " shaped itself in the first disciples, 
far less of Christ himself. But that was at no time 
Browning's way of bringing to expression what he 
deeply cared for. He would not trumpet forth truth 
in his own person, or blazon it through the lips of the 
highest recognised authority; he let it struggle up 
through the baffling density, or glimmer through the 
conflicting persuasions of alien minds, and break out 
in cries of angry wonder or involuntary recognition. 
And nowhere is this method carried further than in 
the Christian poems of the Italian time. The su- 
preme musicians and painters he avoids, but Fra Lippo 
Lippi and Master Hugues belong at least to the crafts 
whose secrets they expound ; while the Christian idea 
is set in a borrowed light caught from the souls of 
men outside the Christian world — an Arab physician, 
a Greek poet, a Jewish shepherd or rabbi, or from 
Christians yet farther from the centre than these, like 
Blougram and the Abbe Deodaet. In method as in 



112 BROWNING 

conception these pieces are among the most Brown- 
ingesque things that Browning ever wrote. It is 
clear, however, that while his way of handling these 
topics is absolutely his own, his peculiar concern with 
them is new. The Karshish^ the Cleon^ and the 
Blougram have no prototype or parallel among the 
poems of Browning's previous periods. In the early 
Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, and in the plays, 
there is exquisite rendering of religion, and also of 
irreligion ; but the religion is just the simple faith of 
Pippa or of Theocrite that " God's in his world " ; and 
the irreligion is the Humanist paganism of St. Praxed's, 
not so much hostile to Christianity as unconscious of 
it. No single poem written before 1850 shows that 
acute interest in the problems of Christian faith which 
constantly emerges in the work of this and the follow- 
ing years. 8aul^ which might be regarded as signally 
refuting this view, strikingly confirms it ; the David 
of the first nine sections, which alone were produced 
in 1845, being the naive, devout child, brother of 
Pippa and of Theocrite ; the evolution of this harp- 
ing shepherd-boy into the illuminated prophet of 
Christ was the splendid achievement of the later 
years.^ And to all this more acutely Christian work 
the Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850) served as a 
significant prologue. 

1 It is, indeed, clear, as has been seen, from Browning's corre- 
spondence that a sequel of this kind was intended when the first 
nine sections were published. The traditional legend of David 
would in any case suggest so much. That the intention was not 
then executed is just the significant fact. 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY II 3 

There can be little doubt that the devout Christian 
faith of his wife was principally concerned in this new 
direction of his poetry. Yet we may easily overstate 
both the nature of her influence and its extent. She, 
as little as he, was a dogmatic Christian , both refused 
to put on, in her phrase, " any of the liveries of the 
sects." ^ " The truth, as God sees it, must be some- 
thing so different from these opinions about truth. 
I believe in what is divine and floats at 
highest, in all these diff^erent theologies, — and because 
the really Divine draws together souls, and tends so 
to a unity, I could pray anywhere and with all sorts 
of worshippers, from the Sistine chapel to Mr. Fox's, 
those kneeling and those standing."^ Yet she de- 
murs, a little farther on in the same letter, to both 
these extremes. " The Unitarians seem to me to 
throw over what is most beautiful in the Christian 
Doctrine ; but the Formulists, on the other side, stir 
up a dust, in which it appears excusable not to see." 
To which he replies (Aug. 17): " Dearest, I know 
your very meaning, in what you said of religion, and 
responded to it with my whole soul — what you ex- 
press now is for us both, . . . those are my own 
feelings, my convictions beside — instinct confirmed by 
reason." 

These words of Browning's seem to furnish the 
clue to the relation between their minds in this mat- 
ter. Their intercourse disturbed no conviction on 
either side, for their convictions were identical. But 
her intense personal devoutness undoubtedly quickened 

» E. B. B. to R. B., 15th Aug., 1846. 2 ib. 



114 BROWNING 

what was personal in his belief, drew it into an at- 
mosphere of keener and more emotional conscious- 
ness, and in particular gave to that " revelation of 
God in Christ " which they both regarded as what 
was " most beautiful in the Christian doctrine," a 
more vital hold upon his intellectual and imaginative 
life. In this sense, but only in this sense, his fervid 
words to her (February, 1846) — " I mean to . . . 
let my mind get used to its new medium of sight, 
seeing all things as it does through you ; and then let 
all I have done be the prelude and the real work be- 
gin " — were not unfulfilled. No deep hiatus, such as 
this phrase suggests, divides the later, as a whole, 
from the earlier work : the " dramatic " method, 
which was among the elements of his art most for- 
eign to her lyric nature, established itself more and 
more firmly in his practice. But the letters of 
1845-46 show that her example was stimulating him 
to attempt a more direct and personal utterance in 
poetry, and while he did not succeed, or succeeded 
only " once and for one only," in evading his dra- 
matic bias, he certainly succeeded in making the dra- 
matic form more eloquently expressive of his personal 
faith. 

This was peculiarly the case in the remarkable 
Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850), the first-fruits 
of his married life, and the most instinct of all his 
poems with the mingled literary and religious influ- 
ences which it brought. The influence of the ardent 
singer, which impelled him to fuller self-expression, 
here concurred with that of the devout but undog- 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY II5 

matic Christian, which drew the problem of Chris- 
tianity nearer to the focus of his imagination and his 
thought. There is much throughout which suggests 
that Browning was deliberately putting off the habits 
and usages of his art, and reaching out this way and 
that towards untried sources and avenues of expres- 
sion. He lays hold for the first time of the machinery 
of supernatural vision. Nothing that he had yet done 
approached in boldness these Christmas and Easter 
apparitions of the Lord of Love. They break in, 
unheralded, a startling but splendid anomaly, upon his 
human and actual world. And the really notable 
thing is that never had he drawn human actuality with 
so remorseless and even brutal fidelity as just here. 
He seeks no legendary scene and atmosphere like that 
of Theocrite's Rome, in which the angels who come 
and go, and God who enjoys his " little human 
praise," would be missed if they were not there ; but 
opens the visions of the Empyrean upon modern 
Camberwell. The pages in which Browning might 
seem, for once, to vie with the author of the Apoc- 
alypse are interleaved with others in which, for once, 
he seems to vie with Balzac or Zola. Of course this 
is intensely characteristic of Browning. The quick- 
ened spiritual pulse which these poems betoken be- 
trays itself just In his more daringly assured embrace 
of the heights and the depths of the universe, as com- 
municating and akin, prompting also that not less 
daring embrace of the extremes of expression, — sub- 
lime imagery and rollicking rhymes, — as equally gen- 
uine utterances of spiritual fervour, — 



Il6 BROWNING 

" When frothy spume and frequent sputter 
Prove that the soul's depths boil in earnest." 

These lines, and the great Shelleyan declaration that 

" A loving worm within its clod 
Were diviner than a loveless God," 

are the key to both poems, but peculiarly to the 
Christmas-Day^ in which they occur. We need not 
in any wise identify Browning with the Christmas- 
Day visionary ; but it is clear that what is " dramatic " 
in him exfoliates, as it were, from a root of character 
and thought which are altogether Browning's own. 
Browning is apparent in the vivacious critic and 
satirist of religious extravagances, standing a little 
aloof from all the constituted religions ; but he is ap- 
parent also in the imaginative and sympathetic student 
of religion, who divines the informing spark of love 
in all sincere worship ; and however far he may have 
been from putting forward the little conventicle with 
its ruins of humanity, its soul at struggle with insanity, 
as his own final choice, that choice symbolised in a 
picturesque half-humorous way his own profound 
preference for the spiritual gogd which is hardly won. 
He makes the speaker choose the " earthen vessel " 
in spite of its " taints of earth," because it brimmed 
with spiritual water ; but in Browning himself there 
was something which relished the spiritual water the 
more because the earthen vessel was flawed. 

Like Christmas- Eve^ Easter-Day is a dramatic study, 
— profound convictions of the poet's own being 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY II 7 

projected as it were through forms of religious con- 
sciousness perceptibly more angular and dogmatically 
defined than his own. The main speaker is plainly 
not identical with the narrator of Christmas-Eve^ who is 
incidentally referred to as " our friend." Their first 
beliefs may be much alike, but in the temper of their be- 
lief they differ widely. The speaker in Christmas-Eve 
is a genial if caustic observer, submitting with robust 
tolerance to the specks in the water which quenches 
his thirst ; the speaker of Easter-Day is an anxious 
precisian, fearful of the contamination of earth, and 
hoping that he may " yet escape " the doom of too 
facile content. The problem of the one is, what to 
believe; the problem of the other, how to believe; 
and each is helped towards a solution by a vision of 
divine love. But the Easter-Day Vision conveys a 
sterner message than that of Christmas-Eve. Love 
now illuminates, not by enlarging sympathy and dis- 
closing the hidden soul of good in error, but by sup- 
pressing sympathies too diffusely and expansively 
bestowed. The Christmas Vision makes humanity 
seem more divine ; the Easter Vision makes the 
divine seem less human. The hypersensitive moral 
nature of the Easter-Day speaker, on the other hand, 
sees his own criminal darkness of heart and mind be- 
fore all else, and the divine visitation becomes a Last 
Judgment, with the fierce vindictive red of the 
Northern Lights replacing the mild glory of the lunar 
rainbows, and a stern and scornful cross-examination 
the silent swift convoy of the winged robe. This 
difference of temper is vividly expressed in the style. 



Il8 BROWNING 

The rollicking rhymes, the "spume and sputter" of 
the fervent soul, give place to a manner of sustained 
seriousness and lyric beauty. 

Yet the Easter-Day speaker probes deeper and 
raises more fundamental issues. When the form of 
Christian belief to be adopted has been settled, a 
certain class of believing minds, not the least 
estimable, will still remain restive. Browning of all 
men felt impatient of every nominal belief held as 
unassimilated material, not welded into the living 
substance of character ; and he makes his Easter- 
Day visionary confound with withering irony the 
"faith" which seeks assurance in outward "evi- 
dence," — 

" 'Tis found, 
No doubt : as is your sort of mind, 
So is your sort of search : you'll find 
What you desire." 

Still less mercy has he for the dogmatic voluptuary 
who complacentlv assumes the " all-stupendous tale " 
of Christianity to have been enacted 

" to give our joys a zest, 
And prove our sorrows for the best." 

Upon these complacent materialisms and epicurean- 
isms of the religious character falls the scorching 
splendour of the Easter Vision, with its ruthless 
condemnation of whatever is not glorified by Love, 
passing over into the uplifting counter-affirmation, 
indispensable to Browning's optimism, that — 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY II9 

" All thou dost enumerate 
Of power and beauty in the world 
The mightiness of Love was curled 
Inextricably round about." 

With all their nobility of feeling, and frequent 
splendour of description, these twin poems cannot 
claim a place in Browning's work at all correspond- 
ing to the seriousness with which he put them for- 
ward, and the imposing imaginative apparatus called 
in. The strong personal conviction which seems to 
have been striving for direct utterance, checked with- 
out perfectly mastering his dramatic instincts and 
habitudes, resulting in a beautiful but indecisive 
poetry which lacks both the frankness of a personal 
deliverance and the plasticity of a work of art. The 
speakers can neither be identified with the poet nor 
detached from him; they are neither his mouthpieces 
nor his creations. The daring supernaturalism seems 
to indicate that the old spell of Dante, so keenly felt 
in the Sordello days, had been wrought to new potency 
by the magic of the life in Dante's Florence, and the 
subtler magic of the love which he was presently to 
compare not obscurely to that of Dante for Beatrice.* 
The divine apparitions have the ironic hauteurs and 
sarcasms of Beatrice in the Paradise. Yet the com- 
parison brings into glaring prominence the radical in- 
coherence of Browning's presentment. In Dante's 
world all the wonders that he describes seem to be in 
place; but the Christmas and Easter Visions are felt 
as intrusive anachronisms in modern London, where 
' Otie Word More. 



120 BROWNING 

the divinest influences are not those which become 
palpable in visions, but those which work through 
heart and brain. 

Browning probably felt this, for the Christmas-Eve 
and Easter-Day stands in this respect alone in his 
work. But the idea of Christ as the sign and 
symbol of the love which penetrates the universe lost 
none of its hold upon his imagination ; and it inspired 
some of the greatest achievements of the Men and 
Women. It was under this impulse that he now, at 
some time during the early Italian years, completed 
the splendid torso of SauL David's Vision of the 
Christ that is to be has as little apparent relation to 
the quiet pastoralism of the earlier stanzas as the 
Easter Vision to the common-sense reflections that 
preceded it. But while this Vision abruptly bursts 
upon him, David's is the final conquest of his own 
ardent intellect, under the impulse of a great human 
task which lifts it beyond its experience, and calls 
out all its powers. David is occupied with no 
speculative question, but with the practical problem 
of saving a ruined soul; and neither logical ingenuity 
nor divine suggestion, but the inherent spiritual 
significance of the situation, urges his thought along 
the lonely path of prophecy. The love for the old 
king, which prompts him to try all the hidden paths 
of his soul in quest of healing, becomes a lighted 
torch by which he tracks out the meaning of the 
world and the still unrevealed purposes of God ; until 
the energy of thought culminates in vision, and the 
Christ stands full before his eyes. All that is super- 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY 121 

natural in the Saul is viewed through the fervid 
atmosphere of David's soul. The magic of the 
wonderful Nocturne at the close, where he feels his 
way home through the appalled and serried gloom, is 
broken by no apparition ; the whole earth is alive and 
awake around him, and thrills to the quickening in- 
rush of the " new land " ; but its light is the tingling 
emotion of the stars, and its voice the cry of the little 
brooks ; and the thronging cohorts of angels and 
powers are unuttered and unseen. 

Only less beautiful than Browning's pictures of 
spiritual childhood are his pictures of spiritual matu- 
rity and old age. The lyric simplicity, the naive in- 
tensity which bear a David, a Pippa, a Pompilia with- 
out effort into the region of the highest spiritual 
vision, appealed less fully to his imagination than the 
more complex and embarrassed processes through 
which riper minds forge their way towards the com- 
pleted insight of a Rabbi ben Ezra. In this sense, 
the great song of David has a counterpart in the 
subtle dramatic study of the Arab physician Karshish. 
He also is startled into discovery by a unique experi- 
ence. But where David is lifted on and on by a 
continuous tide of illuminating thought, perfectly new 
and strange, but to which nothing in him opposes the 
semblance of resistance, Karshish feels only a mys- 
terious attraction, which he hardly confesses, and 
which all the intellectual habits and convictions of a 
life given up to study and thought seem to gainsay. 
No touch of worldly motive belongs to either. The 
shepherd-boy is not more single-souled than this de- 



122 BROWNING 

voted " picker up of learning's crumbs," who makes 
nothing of perilous and toilsome journeys for the sake 
of his art, who is threatened by hungry wild beasts, 
stripped and beaten by robbers, arrested as a spy. At 
every step his quick scrutiny is rewarded by the dis- 
covery of some new drug, mineral, or herb, — " things 
of price " — " blue flowering borage, the Aleppo sort," 
or " Judaea's gum-tragacanth." But Karshish has 
much of the temper of Browning himself: these 
technicalities are the garb of a deep underlying mysti- 
cism. This man's flesh so admirably made by God 
is yet but the earthly prison for ••' that pufF of vapour 
from his mouth, man's soul." The case of Lazarus, 
though at once, as a matter of course, referred to the 
recognised medical categories, yet strangely puzzles 
and arrests him, with a fascination that will not be put 
by. This abstracted docile man of perfect physical 
vigour, who heeds the approach of the Roman aven- 
ger as he would the passing of a woman with gourds 
by the way, and is yet no fool, who seems apathetic 
and yet loves the very brutes and the flowers of the 
field, — compels his scrutiny, as a phenomenon of 
soul, and it is with the eye of a psychological idealist 
rather than of a physician that he interprets him : 

«' He holds on firmly to some thread of life — . . . 
Which runs across some vast distracting orb 
Of glory on either side that meagre thread, 
"Which, conscious of, he must not enter yet — 
The spiritual life around the earthly life : 
The law of that is known to him as this. 
His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here. 
So is the man perplext with impulses 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY 1 23 

Sudden to start off. crosswise, not straight on, 
Proclaiming what is right and wrong across, 
And not along, this black thread through the blaze — 
* It should be ' baulked by ' here it cannot be.' " 

Lazarus stands where Paracelsus conceived that he 
himself stood : he " knows God's secret while he 
holds the thread of life " ; he lives in the glare of abso- 
lute knowledge, an implicit criticism of the Paracelsian 
endeavour to let in upon men the searing splendour 
of the unclouded day. To Karshish, however, these 
very embarrassments — so unlike the knowing clever- 
ness of the spiritual charlatan — make it credible that 
Lazarus is indeed no oriental Sludge, but one who has 
verily seen God. But then came the terrible crux, — 
the pretension, intolerable to Semitic monotheism, 
that God had been embodied in a man. The words 
scorch the paper as he writes, and, like Ferishtah, he 
will not repeat them. Yet he cannot escape the spell 
of the witness, and the strange thought clings tena- 
ciously to him, defying all the evasive shifts of a 
trained mind, and suddenly over-mastering him when 
his concern with it seems finally at an end — when his 
letter is finished, pardon asked, and farewell said — in 
that great outburst, startling and unforeseen yet not 
incredible : 

« The very God ! think, Abib ; dost thou think ? 
So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too, — 
So, through the thunder comes a human voice 
Saying, ' O heart I made, a heart beats here ! ' 
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! " 

That words like these, intensely Johannine in con- 



124 BROWNING 

ception, should seem to start naturally from a mind 
which just before has shrunk in horror from the idea 
of an approximation between God and that which He 
fashioned, is an extraordinary tour de force of dramatic 
portraiture. Among the minor traits which contribute 
to it is one of a kind to which Browning rarely re- 
sorts. The "awe" which invests Lazarus is height- 
ened by a mystic setting of landscape. The visionary 
scene of his first meeting with Karshish, though alto- 
gether Browningesque in detail, is Wordsworthian in 
its mysterious effect upon personality : 

" I crossed a ridge of short, sharp, broken hills 
Like an old lion's cheek teeth. Out there came 
A moon made like a face with certain spots 
Multiform, manifold and menacing : 
Then a wind rose behind me." 

A less formidable problem is handled in the com- 
panion study of Cleon. The Greek mind fascinated 
Browning, though most of his renderings of it have 
the savour of a salt not gathered in Attica, and his 
choice of types shows a strong personal bias. From 
the heroic and majestic elder art of Greece he turns 
with pronounced preference to Euripides the human 
and the positive, with his facile and versatile intellect, 
his agile criticism, and his " warm tears.'* It is some- 
what along these lines that he has conceived his Greek 
poet of the days of Karshish, confronted, like the 
Arab doctor, with the "new thing." As Karshish is 
at heart a spiritual idealist, for all his preoccupation 
with drugs and stones, so Cleon, a past-master of 
poetry and painting, is among the most positive and 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY 1 25 

worldly-wise of men. He looks back over a life 
scored with literary triumphs, as Karshish over his 
crumbs of learning gathered at the cost of blows and 
obloquy. But while Karshish has the true scholar's 
dispassionate and self-efFacing thirst for knowledge, 
Cleon measures his achievements with the insight of 
an epicurean artist. He gathers in luxuriously the 
incense of universal applause, — his epos inscribed on 
golden plates, his songs rising from every fishing-bark 
at nightfall, — and wistfully contrasts the vast range of 
delights which as an artist he imagines, with the lim- 
ited pleasures which as a man he enjoys. The mag- 
nificent symmetry, the rounded completeness of his 
life, suffer a serious deduction here, and his Greek 
sense of harmony suffers offence as well as his human 
hunger for joy. He is a thorough realist, and finds 
no satisfaction in contemplating what he may not pos- 
sess. Art itself suffers disparagement, as heightening 
this vain capacity of contemplation : 

*' I know the joy of kingship : well, thou art king ! " 

With great ingenuity this Greek realism is made the 
stepping-stone to a conception of immortality as un- 
Greek as that of the Incarnation is un-Semitic. Kar- 
shish shrank intuitively from a conception which fas- 
cinated while it awed ; to Cleon a future state in which 
joy and capability will be brought again to equality 
seems a most plausible supposition, which he only re- 
jects with a sigh for lack of outer evidence : — 

" Zeus has not yet revealed it ; and alas, 
He must have done so, were it possible ! " 



126 BROWNING 

The little vignette in the opening lines finely sym- 
bolises the brilliant Greek decadence, as does the clos- 
ing picture in Karshish the mystic dawn of the Earth. 
Here the portico, flooded with the glory of a sun about 
to set, profusely heaped with treasures of art; there 
the naked uplands of Palestine, and the moon rising 
over jagged hills in a wind-swept sky. 

It was in such grave adagio notes as these that 
Browning chose to set forth the "intimations of im- 
mortality " in the meditative wisdom and humanity of 
heathendom. The after-fortunes of the Christian 
legend, on the other hand, and the naive ferocities and 
fantasticalities of the medieval world provoked him 
rather to scher%o^ — audacious and inimitable scher%o^ 
riotously grotesque on the surface, but with a gro- 
tesqueness so penetrated and informed by passion that it 
becomes sublime. Holy-Cross Day and The Heretic's 
Tragedy both culminate, like Karshish and Cleon^ in a 
glimpse of Christ. But here, instead of being ap- 
proached through stately avenues of meditation, it is 
wrung from the grim tragedy of persecution and 
martyrdom. The Jews, packed like rats to hear the 
sermon, mutter under their breath the sublime song of 
Ben Ezra, one of the most poignant indictments of 
Christianity in the name of Christ ever conceived : — 

«* We withstood Christ then ? Be mindful how 
At least we withstand Barabbas now ! 
"Was our outrage sore ? But the worst we spared, 
To have called these — Christians, had we dared ! 
Let defiance of them pay mistrust of Thee, 
And Rome make amends for Calvary ! " 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY l^'J 

And John of Molay, as he burns in Paris Square, cries 
upon " the Name he had cursed with all his life." 
The Tragedy stands alone in literature ; Browning has 
written nothing more original. Its singularity springs 
mainly from a characteristic and wonderfully success- 
ful attempt to render several planes of emotion and 
animus through the same tale. The "singer" looks 
on at the burning, the very embodiment of the robust, 
savagely genial spectator, with a keen eye for all the 
sporting-points in the exhibition, — noting that the 
fagots are piled to the right height and are of the right 
quality — 

" Good sappy bavins that kindle forthwith, . . . 
Larch-heart that chars to a chalk-white glow : " 

and when the torch is clapt-to and he has " leapt back 
safe," poking jests and gibes at the victim. But 
through this distorting medium we see the soul of 
John himself, like a gleam-lit landscape through the 
whirl of a storm ; a strange weird sinister thing, glim- 
mering in a dubious light between the blasphemer we 
half see in him with the singer's eyes and the saint 
we half descry with our own. Of explicit pathos 
there is not a touch. Yet how subtly the inner pathos 
and the outward scorn are fused in the imagery of 
these last stanzas : — 

" Ha, ha, John plucketh now at his rose 
To rid himself of a sorrow at heart ! 
Lo, — petal on petal, fierce rays unclose ; 
Anther on anther, sharp spikes outstart; 



128 BROWNING 

And with blood for dew, the bosom boils ; 

And a gust of sulphur is all its smell ; 
And lo, he is horribly in the toils 

Of a coal-black giant flower of hell ! 

" So, as John called now, through the fire amain, 

On the Name, he had cursed with, all his life — 
To the Person, he bought and sold again — 

For the Face, with his daily buffets rife — 
Feature by feature It took its place : 

And his voice, like a mad dog's choking bark, 
At the steady whole of the Judge's face — 

Died. Forth John's soul flared into the dark." 

None of these dramatic studies of Christianity at- 
tracted so lively an interest as Bishop Blougram* s 
Apology, It was " actual " beyond anything he had 
yet done; it portrayed under the thinnest of veils an 
illustrious Catholic prelate familiar in London society ; 
it could be enjoyed with little or no feeling for poetry ; 
and it was amazingly clever. Even Tennyson, his 
loyal friend but unwilling reader, excepted it, on the 
last ground, from his slighting judgment upon Men and 
Women at large. The figure of Blougram, no less 
than his discourse, was virtually new in Browning, 
and could have come from him at no earlier time. 
He is foreshadowed, no doubt, by a series of those 
accomplished mundane ecclesiastics whom Browning 
at all times drew with so keen a zest, — by Ogniben, 
the bishop in Pippa Passes, the bishop of St. Praxed's. 
But mundane as he is, he bears the mark of that sense 
of the urgency of the Christian problem which since 
Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day had so largely and 
variously coloured Browning's work. It occurred to 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY 1 29 

none of those worldly bishops to justify their worldli- 
ness, — it was far too deeply ingrained for that. But 
Blougram's brilliant defence, enormously dlspropor- 
tioned as it is to the insignificance of the attack, marks 
his tacit recognition of loftier ideals than he professes. 
Like Cleon, he bears involuntary witness to what he 
repudiates. 

But there is much more in Blougram than this. 
The imposing personality of Wiseman contained much 
to attract and conciliate a poet like Browning, whose 
visionary idealism went along with so unaffected a 
relish for the world and the talents which succeed 
there. A great spiritual ruler, performing with con- 
genial ease the enormous and varied functions of his 
office, and with intellectual resources, when they were 
discharged, to win distinction in scholarship, at chess, 
in society, appealed powerfully to Browning's conge- 
nial delight in all strong and vivid life. He was a great 
athlete, who had completely mastered his circum- 
stances and shaped his life to his will. Opposed to a 
man of this varied and brilliant achievement, an inef- 
fectual dilettante appeared a sorry creature enough ; 
and Browning, far from taking his part and putting in 
his craven mouth the burning retorts which the reader 
in vain expects, makes him play helplessly with olive- 
stones while the great bishop rolls him out his mind, 
and then, as one cured and confuted, betake himself 
to the life of humbler practical activity and social 
service. 

It is plain that the actual Blougram offered tempting 
points of contact with that strenuous ideal of life 



130 



BROWNING 



which he was later to preach through the lips of 
" Rabbi ben Ezra." Even what was most prob- 
lematic in him, his apparently sincere profession of 
an outworn creed, suggested the difficult feat of a 
gymnast balancing on a narrow edge, or forcibly hold- 
ing his unbelief in check, — 

" Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot, 
Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe." 

But Browning marks clearly the element both of self- 
deception and deliberate masquerade in Blougram's 
defence. He made him " say right things and call 
them by wrong names." The intellectual athlete in 
him went out to the intellectual athlete in the other, 
and rejoiced in every equation he seemed to establish. 
He played, and made Blougram play, upon the elusive 
resemblance between the calm of effortless mastery 
and that of hardly won control. 

The rich and varied poetry reviewed in the last 
three sections occupies less than half of Men and 
Women^ and leaves the second half of the title unex- 
plained. In that richer emotional atmosphere which 
breathes from every line of his Italian work, the pro- 
found fulfilment of his spiritual needs which he found 
in his home was the most vital and potent element. 
His imaginative grasp of every kind of spiritual en- 
ergy, of every " incident of soul," was deepened by 
his new but incessant and unqualified experience of 
love. His poetry focussed itself more persistently 
than ever about those creative energies akin to love, 
of which art in the fullest sense is the embodiment, 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY I3I 

and religion the recognition. It would have been 
strange if the special form of love-experience to 
which the quickening thrill was due had remained un- 
touched by it. In fact, however, the title of the vol- 
ume is significant as well as accurate ; for Browning's 
poetry of the love between men and women may be 
said, save for a few simple though exquisite earlier 
notes, to begin with it. 

VII 

The love-poetry of the Men and Women volumes, 
as originally published, was the most abundant and 
various, if not the most striking, part of its contents. 
It was almost entirely transferred, in the collected 
edition of his Poems issued in 1863, to other rubrics, 
to the Dramatic Lyrics^ of which it now forms the 
great bulk, and to the Dramatic Romances. But of 
Browning's original " fifty men and women," nearly 
half were lovers or occupied with love. Such fer- 
tility was natural enough in the first years of a su- 
premely happy marriage, crowning an early manhood in 
which love of any kind had, for better or worse, played 
hardly any part at all. Yet almost nothing in these 
beautiful and often brilliant lyrics is in any strict sense 
personal. The biographer who searches them for 
traits quivering with intimate experience searches all 
but in vain. Browning's own single and supreme 
passion touched no fountain of song, such as love sets 
flowing in most poets and in many who are not poets : 
even the memorable months of 1845-46 provoked no 
Sonnets " to the Portuguese." His personal story im- 



132 



BROWNING 



presses itself upon his poetry only through the preoc- 
cupation which it induces with the love-stories of 
other people, mostly quite unlike his own. The white 
light of his own perfect union broke from that pris- 
matic intellect of his in a poetry brilliant with almost 
every other hue. No English poet of his century, 
and few of any other, have made love seem so won- 
derful ; but he habitually takes this wonder bruised 
and jostled in the grip of thwarting conditions. In 
his way of approaching love Browning strangely blends 
the mystic's exaltation with the psychologist's cool 
penetrating scrutiny of its accompanying phenomena, 
its favourable or impeding conditions. The keen 
analytic accent of Paracelsus mingles with the ecstatic 
unearthly note of Shelley. " Love is all " might have 
served as the text for the whole volume of Browning's 
love-poetry ; but the text is wrought out with an 
amazingly acute vision for all the things which are 
not love. " Love triumphing over the world " might 
have been the motto for most of the love-poems in 
Men and Women ; but some would have had to be as- 
signed to the opposite rubric, " The world triumphing 
over love." Sometimes Love's triumphs is, for Brown- 
ing, the rapture of complete union, for which all outer 
things exist only by subduing themselves to its mood 
and taking its hue ; sometimes it is the more ascetic 
and spiritual triumph of an unrequited lover in the 
lonely glory of his love. 

The triumph of Browning's united lovers has often 
a superb Elizabethan note of defiance. Passion ob- 
literates for them the past and throws a mystically 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY I33 

hued veil over Nature. The gentle Romantic senti- 
ments hardly touch the fresh springs of their emotion. 
They may meet and woo " among the ruins," as 
Coleridge met and wooed his Genevieve " beside the 
ruined tower " ; but their song does not, like his, 
" suit well that ruin old and hoary," but, on the con- 
trary, tramples with gay scorn upon the lingering 
memories of the ruined city, — a faded pageant yoked 
to its triumphal car. 

" Oh heart ! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns ! 

Earth's returns 
For whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin ! 

Shut them in, 
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest I 

Love is best." 

Another lover, in My Star^ pours lyric disdain upon 
his friends for whose purblind common-sense vision 
the star which to him " dartled red and blue," now a 
bird, now a flower, was just — a star. More finely 
touched than either of these is By the Fireside. After 
One Word Afore^ to which it is obviously akin, it is 
Browning's most perfect rendering of the luminous 
inner world, all-sufficing and self-contained, of a rap- 
turous love. The outer world is here neither thrust 
aside nor fantastically varied ; it is drawn into the 
inner world by taking its hue and becoming the con- 
fidant and executant of its will. A landscape so in- 
stinct with the hushed awe of expectation and with a 
mystic tenderness is hardly to be found elsewhere save 
in Christabel^ — 



134 BROWNING 

** We two stood there with never a third. 
But each by each, as each knew well : 
The sights we saw and the sounds we heard, 
The lights and the shades made up a spell, 
Till the trouble grew and stirred. 

* -Jfr * -X- -X- -Jfr 

" A moment after, and hands unseen 

Were hanging the night around us fast ; 
But we knew that a bar was broken between 

Life and life : we were mixed at last 
In spite of the mortal screen. 

" The forests had done it ; there they stood ; 

W^e caught for a moment the powers at play : 
They had mingled us so, for once and good, 

Their work was done — we might go or stay. 
They relapsed to their ancient mood." 

By the Fireside is otherwise memorable as portraying 
with whatever disguise the Italian home-life of the 
poet and his wife. The famous description of " the 
perfect wife " as she sat 

" Musing by firelight, that great brow 
And the spirit-small hand propping it. 
Yonder, my heart knows how " — 

remain among the most living portraitures of that ex- 
quisite but fragile form. Yet neither here nor else- 
where did Browning care to dwell upon the finished 
completeness of the perfect union. His intellectual 
thirst for the problematic, and his ethical thirst for 
the incomplete, combined to hurry him away to the 
moments of suspense, big with undecided or unfulfilled 
fate. The lover among the ruins is awaiting his mis- 
tress J the rapturous expectancy of another waiting 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY 1 35 

lover is sung in In Three Days. And from the fireside 
the poet wanders in thought from that highest height 
of love which he has won to the mystic hour before 
he won it, when the elements out of which his fate 
was to be resolved still hung apart, awaiting the mag- 
ical touch, which might never be given : — 

« Oh moment, one and infinite ! 

The water sHps o'er stock and stone ; 
The West is tender, hardly bright : 

How grey at once is the evening grown — 

One star, its chrysolite ! 
* * * 4t -jfr * 

" Oh, the little more, and how much it is ! 

And the little less, and what worlds away ! 
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss, 

Or a breath suspend the blood's best play, 
And life be a proof of this ! " 

But the poet who lingered over these moments of 
suspended fate did not usually choose the harmonious 
solution of them. The " little less " of incomplete 
response might " suspend the breath " of the lover, 
but it was an inexhaustible inspiration to the poet. 
It provokes, for instance, the delicate symbolism of 
the twin lyrics Love in a Life and Life in a Love^ 
variations on the same theme — vain pursuit of the 
averted face — the one a largo^ sad, persistent, dreamily 
hopeless ; the other impetuous, resolute, glad. The 
dreamier mood is elaborated in the Serenade at the 
Villa and One Way of Love. A few superbly imagi- 
native phrases bring the Italian summer night about 
us, sultry, storm-shot, starless, still, — 

" Life was dead, and so was light." 



136 



BROWNING 



The Serenader himself is no child of Italy but a 
meditative Teuton, who, Hamlet-like, composes for 
his mistress the answer which he would not have her 
give. The lover in One Way of Love is something of 
a Teuton too, and has thoughts which break the ve- 
hemence of the impact of his fate. But there is a 
first moment when he gasps and knits himself closer 
to endure — admirably expressed in the sudden change 
to a brief trochaic verse j then the grim mood is dis- 
solved in a momentary ecstasy of remembrance or of 
idea — and the verse, too, unfolds and releases itself in 
sympathy : — 

" She will not hear my music ? So I 
Break the string ; fold music's wing ; 
Suppose Pauline had bade me sing ! " 

Or, instead of this systole and diastole alternation, the 
glory and the pang are fused and interpenetrated in a 
continuous mood. Such a mood furnishes the spir- 
itual woof of one of Browning's most consummate 
and one of his loveliest lyrics. The Last Ride Together 
and Evelyn Hope, " How are we to take it ? " asks 
Mr. Fotheringham of the latter. " As the language 
of passion resenting death and this life's woeful in- 
completeness ? or as a provision of the soul in a mo- 
ment of intensest life ? " The question may be asked ; 
yet the passion of regret which glows and vibrates 
through it is too suffused with exalted faith in a final 
recovery to find poignant expression. This lyric, 
with its taking melody, has delighted thousands to 
whom Browning is otherwise "pbscure," partly because 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY 1 37 

It appeals with naive audacity at once to Romantic 
and to Christian sentiment — combining the faith in 
love's power to seal its object for ever as its own with 
the Christian faith in personal immortality — a per- 
sonal immortality in which there is yet marrying and 
giving in marriage, as Romance demands. The Last 
Ride Together has attracted a different audience. Its 
passion is of a rarer and more difficult kind, less ac- 
cessible to the love and less flattering to the faith of 
common minds. This lover dreams of no future re- 
covery of more than he still retains ; his love, once 
for all, avails nothing ; and the secure faith of Eve- 
lyn's lover, that " God creates the love to reward the 
love,'* is not his. His mistress will never " awake 
and remember and understand." But that dead form 
he is permitted to clasp ; and in the rapture of that 
phantom companionship passion and thought slowly 
transfigure and glorify his fate, till from the lone limbo 
of outcast lovers he seems to have penetrated to the 
innermost fiery core of life, which art and poetry 
grope after in vain — to possess that supreme moment 
of earth which, prolonged, is heaven. 

" What if heaven be that, fair and strong 
At life's best, with our eyes upturned 
Whither life's flower is first discerned, 
We, fixed so, ever should so abide ? 
What if we still ride on, we too 
With life for ever old yet new, 
Changed not in kind but in degree, 
The instant made eternity, — 
And heaven just prove that I and she 
Ride, ride together, for ever ride ? " 



138 BROWNING 

The "glory of failure" is with Browning a familiar 
and inexhaustible theme ; but its spiritual abstraction 
here flushes with the human glory of possession ; the 
aethereal light and dew are mingled with breath and 
blood ; and in the wonderful long-drawn rhythm of 
the verse we hear the steady stride of the horses as 
they bear their riders farther and farther in to the vi- 
sionary land of Romance. 

It is only the masculine lover whom Browning al- 
lows thus to get the better of unreturned love. His 
women have no such remedia amoris; their heart's 
blood will not transmute into the ichor of poetry. It 
is women almost alone who ever utter the poignancy 
of rejected love ; in them it is tragic, unreflecting, 
unconsolable, and merciless ; while something of his 
own elastic buoyancy of intellect, his supple optimism, 
his analytic, dissipating fancy, infused itself into his 
portrayal of the grief-pangs of his own sex. This 
distinction is very apparent in the group of lyrics 
which deal with the less complete divisions of love. 
An almost oppressive intensity of womanhood pulses 
in A Woman's Last Word^ In a Teat\ and Jny Wife to 
Any Husband: the first, with its depth of self-abase- 
ment and its cloying lilting melody, trembles, exquisite 
as it is, on the verge of the " sentimental.'* There is 
a rarer, subtler pathos in Two in the Campagna. The 
outward scene finds its way to his senses, and its 
images make a language for his mood, or else they 
break sharply across it and sting it to a cry. He feels 
the Campagna about him, with its tranced immensity 
lying bare to heaven : — 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY I39 

" Silence and passion, joy and peace, 

An everlasting wash of air — . . . 

Such life here, through such length of hours, 
Such miracles performed in play, 

Such primal naked forms of flowers. 
Such letting nature have her way 

While heaven looks from its towers ; " 

and in the presence of that large sincerity of nature he 
would fain also " be unashamed of soul " and probe 
love's wound to the core. But the invisible barriers 
will not be put aside or transcended, and in the midst 
of that "• infinite passion " there remain " the finite 
hearts that yearn." Or else he wakes after the quar- 
rel in the blitheness of a bright dawn : — 

" All is blue again 

After last night's rain, 
And the South dries the hawthorn spray. 

Only, my love's away ! 
I'd as lief that the blue were grey." 

The disasters of love rarely, with Browning, stir 
us very deeply. His temperament was too elastic, 
his intellect too resourceful, to enter save by artificial 
processes into the mood of blank and hopeless grief. 
Tragedy did not lie in his blood, and fortune — kinder 
to the man than to the poet — had as yet denied him, 
in love, the " baptism of sorrow " which has wrung 
immortal verse from the lips of frailer men. It 
may even be questioned whether all Browning's 
poetry of love's tragedy will live as long as a few 
stanzas of Musset's Nuits^ — bare, unadorned verses, 



140 BROWNING 

devoid of fancy or wit, but intense and penetrating 
as a cry : — 

« Ce soir encor je t'ai vu m'apparaitre, 

C'etait par une triste nuit. 
L'aile des vents battait k ma fenetre ; 

J'etais seul, courbe sur mon lit. 
J'y regardais une place cherie, 

Tiede encor d'un baiser brulant ; 
Et je songeais comme la femme oublie, 
Et je sentais un lambeau de ma vie, 

Qui se dechirait lentement. 

" Je rassemblais des lettres de la veille, 

Des cheveux, des debris d' amour. 
Tout ce passe me criait a I'oreille 

Ses 6ternels serments d'un jour. 
Je contemplais ces reliques sacrdes. 

Qui ire faisaient trembler la main: 
Larmes du coeur par le coeur devorees, 
Et que les yeux qui les avaient pleurees 

Ne reconnaitront plus demain !" > 

The same quest of the problematic which attracted 
Browning to the poetry of passion repelled or un- 
requited made him a curious student also of fainter 
and feebler " wars of love " — embryonic or simulated 
forms of passion which stood still farther from his 
personal experience, vf Light TVoman^ A Pretty 
Woman^ and Another Way of Love are refined studies 
in this world of half tones. But the most important 
and individual poem of this group is The Statue and 
the Bust^ an excellent example of the union in Brown- 
* Musset, Nuit de dicembre. 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY I4I 

ing of the Romantic temper with a peculiar mastery 
of everything in human nature which traverses and 
repudiates Romance. The duke and the lady are 
simpler and slighter Hamlets — Hamlets who have no 
agonies of self-questioning and self-reproach ; inter- 
vening in the long pageant of the famous lovers of 
romantic tradition with the same disturbing shock as 
he in the bead-roll of heroic avengers. The poet's 
indignant denunciation of his lovers at the close, ap- 
parently for not violating the vows of marriage, is 
puzzling to readers who do not appreciate the extreme 
subtlety of Browning's use of figure. He was at 
once too much and too little of a casuist, — too 
habituated to fine distinctions and too unaware of 
the pitfalls they often present to others, — to un- 
derstand that in condemning his lovers for wanting 
the energy to commit a crime he could be supposed 
to imply approval of the crime they failed to com- 
mit. 

Lastly, in the outer periphery of his love poetry 
belong his rare and fugitive " dreams " of love. 
Women and Roses has an intoxicating swiftness and 
buoyancy of music. But there is another and more 
sinister kind of love-dream — the dream of an unloved 
woman. Such a dream, with its tragic disillusion. 
Browning painted in his poignant and original In a 
Balcony, It is in no. sense a drama, but a dramatic 
incident in three scenes, affecting the fates of three 
persons, upon whom the entire interest is con- 
centrated. The three vivid and impressive char- 
acter-heads stand out with intense and minute 



142 BROWNING 

brilliance from a background absolutely blank and 
void. Though the scene is laid in a court and the 
heroine is a queen, there is no bustle of political 
intrigue, no conflict between the rival attractions of 
love and power, as in Colombes Birthday. Love is 
the absorbing preoccupation of this society, the 
ultimate ground of all undertakings. There is vague 
talk of diplomatic victories, of dominions annexed, 
of public thanksgivings ; but the statesman who has 
achieved all this did it all to win the hand of a girl, 
and the aged queen whom he has so successfully 
served has secretly dreamed all the time, though al- 
ready wedded, of being his. For a brilliant young 
minister to fail to make love to his sovereign, in spite 
of her grey hairs and the marriage law, is a kind of 
high treason. In its social presuppositions this com- 
munity belongs to a world as visionary as the mystic 
dream-politics of M. Maeterlin>ck. But, those pre- 
suppositions granted, everything in it has the uncom- 
promising clearness and persuasive reality that Brown- 
ing invariably communicates to his dreams. The 
three figures who in a few hours taste the height of 
ecstasy and then the bitterness of disillusion or 
severance, are drawn with remarkable psychologic 
force and truth, p'or all three love is the absorbing 
passion, the most real thing in life, scornfully con- 
trasted with the reflected joys of the painter or the 
poet. Norbert's noble integrity is of a kind which 
mingles in duplicity and intrigue with disastrous re- 
sults ; he is too invincibly true to himself easily to 
act a part; but he can control the secret hunger of 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY I43 

his heart and give no sign, until the consummate hour 
arrives when he may 

" resume 
Life after death (it is no less than life, 
After such long unlovely labouring days) 
And liberate to beauty life's great need 
O' the beautiful, which, while it prompted work, 
Suppress'd itself erewhile." 

In the ecstasy of release from that suppression, every 
tree and flower seems to be an embodiment of the 
harmonious freedom he had so long foregone, as 
Wordsworth, chafing under his unchartered freedom, 
saw everywhere the willing submission to Duty. 
Even 

" These statues round us stand abrupt, distinct, 
The strong in strength, the weak in weakness fixed, 
The Muse for ever wedded to her lyre, 
Nymph to her fawn, and Silence to her rose : 
See God's approval on his universe ! 
Let us do so — aspire to live as these 
In harmony with truth, ourselves being true ! " 

But it is the two women who attract Browning's most 
powerful handling. One of them, the Queen, has 
hardly her like for pity and dread. A " lavish soul " 
long starved, but kindling into the ecstasy of girlhood 
at the seeming touch of love ; then, as her dream is 
shattered by the indignant honesty of Norbert, trans- 
muted at once into the daemonic Gudrun or Brynhild, 
glaring in speechless white-heat and implacable frenzy 
upon the man who has scorned her proffered heart 



144 BROWNING 

and the hapless girl he has chosen.^ Between these 
powerful, rigid, and simple natures stands Constance, 
ardent as they, but with the lithe and palpitating 
ardour of a flame. She is concentrated Romance. 
Her love is an intense emotion ; but some of its 
fascination lies in its secrecy, — 

" Complots inscrutable, deep telegraphs, 
Long-planned chance meetings, hazards of a look " ; 

she shrinks from a confession which " at the best " 
will deprive their love of its spice of danger and 
make them even as their " five hundred openly happy 
friends." She loves adventure, ruse, and stratagem 
for their own sake. But she is also romantically 
generous, and because she "owes this withered 

1 An anecdote to which Prof. Dowden has lately called attention 
{Browning, p. 66) describes Browning in his last years as de- 
murring to the current interpretation of the denotiment. Some 
one had remarked that it was " a natural sequence that the guard 
should be heard coming to take Norbert to his doom." " ' Now I 
don't quite think that,* answered Browning, as if he were following 
out the play as a spectator. ' The queen has a large and passion- 
ate temperament. . . . She would have died by a knife in her 
heart. The guard would have come to carry away her dead 
body.' " The catastrophe here suggested is undoubtedly far finer 
tragedy. But we cannot believe that this was what Brownmg 
originally meant to happen. That Norbert and Constance expect 
" doom " is obvious, and the queen's parting " glare " leaves the 
reader in no doubt that they are right. They may, nevertheless, 
be wrong ; but what, then, is meant by the coming of the guard, 
and the throwing open of the doors ? The queen has in any case 
not died on the stage, for she had left it ; and if she died outside, 
how should they have come " to carry away her dead body " ? 



WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY I45 

woman everything," is eager to sacrifice her own 
hopes of happiness. 

Were it not for its unique position in Browning*s 
poetry, one might well be content with a passing 
tribute to the great love canticle which closes Men 
and Women — the crown, as it is in a pregnant sense 
the nucleus, of the whole. But here, for " once, and 
only once, and for one only," not only the dramatic 
instinct, which habitually coloured all his speech, but 
the reticence which so hardly permitted it to disclose 
his most intimate personal emotion, were deliberately 
overcome — overcome, however, only in order, as it 
were, to explain and justify their more habitual sway. 
All the poetry in it is reached through the endeavour 
to find speaking symbols for a love that cannot be 
told. The poet is a high priest, entering with awed 
steps the sanctuary which even he cannot tread with- 
out desecration save after divesting himself of all that 
is habitual and of routine, — even the habits of his 
genius and the routine of his art. Unable to divest 
himself of his poetry altogether, for he has no other 
art, he lays aside his habitual dramatic guise to speak, 
for once, not as Lippo, Roland, or Andrea, but " in 
his true person." And he strips ofF the veil of his art 
and speaks in his own person only to declare that 
speech is needless, and to fall upon that exquisite 
symbol of an esoteric love uncommunicated and incom- 
municable to the apprehension of the world, — the 
moon's other face with all its " silent silver lights and 
darks," undreamed of by any mortal. " Heaven's 
gift takes man's abatement," and poetry itself may 



146 BROWNING 

only hint at the divinity of perfect love. The One 
Word More was written in September, 1855, shortly 
before the publication of the volume it closed, as the 
old moon waned over the London roofs. Less than 
six years later the " moon of poets " had passed for 
ever from his ken. 



CHAPTER V 

LONDON. DRAMATIS PERSONS 

Ah, Love ! but a day 

And the world has changed ! 
The sun's away, 

And the bird estranged. 

— James Lee's Wife. 

That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows. 
Or decomposes but to recompose. 
Become my universe that feels and knows. 

— Epilogue. 

The catastrophe of June 29, 1861, closed with 
appalling suddenness the fifteen years' married life of 
Browning. "I shall grow still, I hope," he wrote to 
Miss Haworth, a month later, " but my root is taken, 
and remains." The words vividly express the valour 
in the midst of desolation which animated one little 
tried hitherto by sorrow. The Italian home was shat- 
tered, and no thought of even attempting a patched-up 
existence in its ruined walls seems to have occurred 
to him ; even the neighbourhood of the spot in which 
all that was mortal of her had been laid had no power 
to detain him. But his departure was no mere flight 
from scenes intolerably dear. He had their child to 
educate and his own life to fulfil, and he set himself 
with grim resolution to the work, as one who had in- 
deed had everything.^ but who was as little inclined to 

147 



148 BROWNING 

abandon himself to the past as to forget it. After 
visiting his father in Paris — the " dear nonno " of 
his wife's charming letters ^ — he settled in London, 
at first in lodgings, then at the house in Warwick 
Crescent which was for a quarter of a century to be 
his home. Something of that dreary first winter 
found its way, ten years later, through whatever dra- 
matic disguise, into the poignant epilogue of Fifine. 
Browning had been that " Householder," had gone 
through the dragging days and nights, — 

" All the fuss and trouble of street-sounds, window-sights, 
All the worry of flapping door and echoing roof ; and then 
All the fancies," — 

perhaps, among them, that of the " knock, call, cry," 
and the pang and rapture of the visionary meeting. 
Certainly one of the effects of his loss was to accen- 
tuate the mood of savage isolation which lurked be- 
neath Browning's genial sociality. The world from 
which his saint had been snatched looked very com- 
mon, sordid, and mean, and he resented its intrusive- 
ness on occasion with startling violence. When 
proposals were made in 1863 in various quarters to 
publish her life, he turned like a wild beast upon the 
" blackguards " who " thrust their paws into his 
bowels " by prying into his intimacies. To the last 
he dismissed similar proposals by critics of the highest 
status with a cavalier bluntness highly surprising to 
persons who only knew him as the man of punctilious 

1 His father beautifully said of Mrs. Browning's portrait that it 
was a face which made the worship of saints seem possible. 



LONDON 



149 



observance and fastidious good form. For the rest, 
London contained much that was bound by degrees to 
temper the gloom and assuage the hostility. Florence 
and Rome could furnish nothing like the circle of 
men of genius and varied accomplishment, using like 
himself the language of Shakespeare and Milton, in 
vi^hich he presently began to move as an intimate. 
Thackeray, Ruskin, Tennyson, Carlyle, Rossetti, 
Leighton, Woolner, Prinsep, and many more, added 
a kind of richness to his life which during the last 
fifteen years he had only enjoyed at intervals. And 
the flock of old friends who accepted Browning be- 
gan to be reinforced by a crowd of unknown readers 
who proclaimed him. Tennyson was his loyal com- 
rade ; but the prestige of Tennyson's popularity had 
certainly blocked many of the avenues of Browning's 
fame, appealing as the Laureate largely did to tastes in 
poetry which Browning rudely traversed or ignored. 
On the Tennysonian reader pur sang Browning's 
work was pretty sure to make the impression so 
frankly described by Frederick Tennyson to his 
brother, of " Chinese puzzles, trackless labyrinths, 
unapproachable nebulosities." Even among these 
intimates of his own generation were doubtless some 
who, with F. Tennyson again, believed him to be " a 
man of infinite learning, jest, and bonhomie, and a 
sterling heart that reverbs no hollowness," but who 
yet held "his school of poetry " to be "the most 
grotesque conceivable." This was the tone of the 
'Fifties, when Tennyson's vogue was at its height. 
But with the 'Sixties there began to emerge a critical 



150 BROWNING 

disposition to look beyond the trim pleasances of the 
Early Victorians to more daring romantic adventure 
in search of the truth that lies in beauty, and more 
fearless grip of the beauty that lies in truth. The 
genius of the pre-Raphaelites began to find response. 
And so did the yet richer and more composite genius 
of Browning. Moreover, the immense vogue won 
by the poetry of his wife undoubtedly prepared the 
way for his more difficult but kindred work. If 
Pippa Passes counts for something in Aurora Le'igh^ 
Aurora Leigh in its turn trained the future readers of 
The Ring and the Book. 

The altered situation became apparent on the pub- 
lication, in rapid succession, in 1864, of Browning's 
Dramatis Persona: and Mr. Swinburne's Atalanta in 
Calydon. Both volumes found their most enthusiastic 
readers at the universities. " All my new cultivators 
are young men," Browning wrote to Adiss Blagden ; 
adding, with a touch of malicious humour, " more 
than that, I observe that some of my old friends don't 
like at all the irruption of outsiders who rescue me 
from their sober and private approval, and take those 
words out of their mouths which they ' always meant 
to say,' and never did." The volume included prac- 
tically all that Browning had actually written since 
1855, — less than a score of pieces, — the somewhat 
slender harvest of nine years. But during these later 
years in Italy, as we have seen, he had done little at 
his art; and after his return much time had been oc- 
cupied m projecting the great scheme of that which 
figures in his familiar letters as his " murder-poem," 



LONDON 151 

and was ultimately known as The Ring and the Book. 
As a whole, the Dramatis Per some stands yet more 
clearly apart from Men and Women than that does 
from all that had gone before. Both books contain 
some of his most magnificent work ; but the earlier 
is full of summer light and glow, the later breathes 
the hectic and poignant splendour of autumn. The 
sense of tragic loss broods over all its music. In 
lyric strength and beauty there is no decay ; but the 
dramatic imagination has certainly lost somewhat of 
its flexible strength and easy poise of wing : falling 
back now upon the personal convictions of the poet, 
now upon the bald prose of daily life. Rabbi ben 
Ezra and Abt Vogler^ A Death in the Desert^ are as 
noble poetry as Andrea del Sarto or The Grammarian* s 
Funeral i but it is a poetry less charged with the 
" incidents " of any other soul than his own ; and, on 
the other hand, Dis Aliter Visum and Youth and Art^ 
and others, effective as they are, yet move in an at- 
mosphere less remote from prose than any of the 
songs and lays of love which form one of the chief 
glories of Men and Women. The world which is 
neither thrillingly beautiful nor grotesquely ugly, but 
simply poor, unendowed, humdrum, finds for the first 
time a place in his poetry. Its blankness answered 
too well to the desolate regard which in the early 
'Sixties he turned upon life. The women are homely, 
even plain, like James Lee's wife, with her " coarse 
hands and hair," and Edith in Too Late.^ with her thin, 
odd features, or mediocre, like the speaker in Dis 
Aliter Visum ; and they have homely names, like 



152 BROWNING 

" Lee " or " Lamb '' or " Brown," not gratuitously 
grotesque ones like Blougram, Blouphocks, or the 
outrageous " Gigadibs." " Sludge " stands on a dif- 
ferent footing ; for it is dramatically expressive, as 
these are not. The legend of the gold-haired maiden 
of Pornic is told with a touch of harsher cynicism 
than was heard in Galuppi's "chill" music of the 
vanished beauties of Venice. If we may by no 
means say that the glory of humanity has faded for 
Browning, yet its glory has become more fugitive and 
more extrinsic, — a " grace not theirs " brought by love 
"settling unawares" upon minds "level and low, 
burnt and bare " in themselves. And he dwells now 
on desolate and desert scenes with a new persistence, 
just as it was wild primitive nooks of the French 
coast which now became his chosen summer resorts 
in place of the semi-civic rusticity which had been his 
choice in Italy. " This is a wild little place in Brit- 
tany," he wrote to Miss Blagden in August, 1863; 
" close to the sea, a hamlet of a dozen houses, per- 
fectly lonely — one may walk on the edge of the low 
rocks by the sea for miles. . . . If I could I 
would stay just as I am for many a day. I feel out 
of the very earth sometimes as I sit here at the win- 
dow." The wild coast scenery falls in with the deso- 
late mood of James Lee's wife; the savage luxuriance 
of the Isle with the primitive fancies of Caliban ; the 
arid desert holds in its embrace, like an oasis, the 
well-spring of Love which flows from the lips of the 
dying Apostle. In the poetry of Men and Women we 
see the ripe corn and the flowers in bloom ; in 



LONDON 153 

Dramatis PersoneE the processes of Nature are less 
spontaneous and, as it were, less complete \ the desert 
and the abounding streams, the unreclaimed human 
nature and the fertilising grace of love, emerge in a 
nearer approach to elemental nakedness, and there are 
moods in which each appears to dominate. Doubtless 
the mood which finally triumphed was that of the 
dying John and of the Third Speaker 5 but it was a 
triumph no longer won by " the happy prompt in- 
stinctive way of youth," and the way to it lay through 
moods not unlike those of James Lee's wife, whose 
problem, like his own, was how to live when the an- 
swering love was gone. His " fire," like hers, was 
made " of shipwreck wood," ^ and her words " at the 
window" can only be an echo of his — 

" Ah, Love ! but a day 

And the world has changed ! 

The sun's away, 

And the bird estranged ; 

The wind has dropped, 
And the sky's deranged : 

Summer has stopped." 

As her problem is another life-setting of his, so she 
feels her way towards its solution through processes 
which cannot have been strang-e to him. She walks 
" along the Beach," or " on the Cliff," or " among the 

' The second section of James Lee's Wife, By the Fireside, can- 
not have been written without a conscious, and therefore a pur- 
posed and significant, reference to the like-named poem in Men 
and Women, which so exquisitely plays with the intimate scenery 
of his home-life. 



154 BROWNING 

rocks," and the voices of sea and wind (" Such a soft 
sea and such a mournful wind ! " he wrote to Miss 
Blagden) become speaking symbols in her preoccupied 
mind. Not at all, however, in the fashion of the 
" pathetic fallacy." She is too deeply disenchanted to 
imagine pity ; and Browning puts into her mouth (part 
vi.) a significant criticism of some early stanzas of his 
own, in which he had in a buoyant optimistic fashion 
interpreted the wailing of the wind.^ If Nature has 
aught to teach, it is the sterner doctrine, that nothing 
endures ; that Love, like the genial sunlight, has to 
glorify base things, to raise the low nature by its throes, 
sometimes divining the hidden spark of God in what 
seemed mere earth, sometimes only lending its transient 
splendour to a dead and barren spirit, — the fiery grace 
of a butterfly momentarily obliterating the dull turf or 
rock it lights on, but leaving them precisely what they 
were. 

'James Lee's Wife is a type of the other idyls of love 
which form so large a part of the Dramatis Persona. 
The note of dissonance, of loss, which they sound had 
been struck by Browning before, but never with the 
same persistence and iteration. The Dramatic Lyrics 
and Men and Women are not quite silent of the tragic 
failure of love ; but it is touched lightly in " swallow 
flights of song," like the Lost Mistress^ that " dip their 
wings in tears and skim away." And the lovers are 
spiritual athletes, who can live on the memory of a 
look, and seem to be only irradiated, not scorched, by 
the tragic flame. But these lovers of the 'Sixties are 
^ Cf. supra, p. 1 6. 



LONDON 155 

of less aethereal temper ; they are more obviously, 
familiarly human ; the loss of what they love comes 
home to them, and there is agony in the purifying lire. 
Such are the wronged husband in The Worst of It^ and 
the finally frustrated lover in Too Late. In the group 
of " Might-have-been " lyrics the sense of loss is less 
poignant and tragic but equally uncompensated. " You 
fool ! " cries the homely little heroine of Dis Aliter 
Visum to the elderly scholar who ten years before had 
failed to propose to her, — 

" You fool for all your lore ! . . . 
The devil laughed at you in his sleeve ! 
You knew not ? That I well believe; 
Or you had saved two souls; — nay, four." 

Nor is there much of the glory of failure in Kate 
Brown's bitter smile, as she sums up the story of Youth 
and Art : — 

" Each life unfulfilled, you see ; 

It hangs still, patchy and scrappy, 
We have not sighed deep, laughed free, 
Starved, feasted, despaired, — been happy." 

It is no accident that with the clearer recognition of 
sharp and absolute loss Browning shows increasing pre- 
occupation with the thought of recovery after death. 
For himself death was now inseparably intertwined with 
all that he had known of love, and the prospect of the 
supreme reunion which death, as he believed, was to 
bring him, drew it nearer to the core of his imagina- 
tion and passion. Not that he looked forward to it 



156 BROWNING 

with the easy complacency of the hymn-writer. Pros- 
pice would not be the great uplifting song it is were 
the note of struggle, of heroic heart to bear the brunt 
and pay in one moment all " life's arrears of pain, dark- 
ness, and cold," less clearly sounded ; and were the final 
cry less intense with the longing of bereavement. How 
near this thought of rapturous reunion lay to the 
springs of Browning's imagination at this time, how 
instantly it leapt into poetry, may be seen from the 
Eurydice to Orpheus which he fitly placed immediately 
after these — 

" But give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow ! 
Let them once more absorb me ! " 

But in two well-known poems of the Dramatis Per^ 
soncs Browning has splendidly unfolded what is implicit 
in the strong simple clarion-note of Prospice. Aht 
Vogler and Rabbi ben E'z.ra are among the surest 
strongholds of his popular fame. Rabbi ben Exra is a 
great song of life, bearing more fully perhaps than any 
other poem the burden of what he had to say to his 
generation, but lifted far above mere didacticism by 
the sustained glow in which ethical passion, and its 
imaginative splendour, indistinguishably blend. It is 
not for nothing that Browning put this loftiest utter- 
ance of all that was most strenuous in his own faith 
into the mouth of a member of the race which has be- 
yond others known how to suffer and how to transfigure 
its suffering. Ben Ezra's thoughts are not all Hebraic, 
but they are conceived in the most exalted temper of 
Hebrew prophecy ; blending the calm of achieved 



LONDON 157 

wisdom with the fervour of eagerly accepted discipline, 
imperious scorn for the ignorance of fools, and heroic 
ardour for the pangs and throes of the fray. Ideals 
which, coolly analysed, seem antithetical, and which 
have in reality inspired opposite ways of life, meet in 
the fusing flame of the Rabbi's impassioned thought : 
the body is the soul's beguiling sorceress, but also its 
helpful comrade ; man is the passive clay which the 
great Potter moulded and modelled upon the Wheel 
of Time, and yet is bidden rage and strive, the ador- 
ing acquiescence of Eastern Fatalism mingling with 
the Western gospel of individual energy. And all this 
complex and manifold ethical appeal is conveyed in 
verse of magnificent volume and resonance, effacing 
by the swift recurrent anvil crash of its rhythm any 
suggestion that the acquiescence of the " clay " means 
passivity. 

In Abt Vogler the prophetic strain is even more 
daring and assured ; only it springs not from '' old 
experience," but from the lonely ecstasy of artistic 
creation. Browning has put into the mouth of his old 
Catholic musician the most impassioned and undoubt- 
ing assertion to be found in his work of his faith that 
nothing good is finally lost. The Abbe's theology 
may have supplied the substance of the doctrine, but 
it could not supply the beautiful, if daring, expansion 
of it by which the immortality of men's souls is ex- 
tended to " all we have willed or hoped or dreamed 
of good." This was the work of music ; and the 
poem is in truth less remarkable for this rapturous 
statement of fate than for the penetrating power with 



158 BROWNING 

which the mystical and transcendental suggestions of 
music are explored and unfolded, — the mysterious 
avenues which it seems to open to kinds of experience 
more universal than ours, exempt from the limitations 
of our narrow faculties, even from the limitations of 
time and space themselves. All that is doctrinal and 
speculative in Abt Vogler is rooted in musical expe- 
rience, — the musical experience, no doubt, of a richly 
imaginative mind, for which every organ-note turns 
into the symbol of a high romance, till he sees heaven 
itself yearning down to meet his passion as it seeks 
the sky. Of the doctrine and speculation we may 
think as we will \ of the psychological force and truth 
of the whole presentment there can be as little ques- 
tion as of its splendour and glow. It has the sinew, 
as well as the wing, of poetry. And neither in poetry 
nor in prose has the elementary marvel of the simplest 
musical form been more vividly seized than in the 
well-known couplet — 

" I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man 
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a 
star." 

A Death in the Desert^ though a poem of great 
beauty, must be set, in intrinsic value, below these 
two. To attack Strauss through the mouth of the 
dying apostle was a smart pamphleteering device ; but 
it gave his otherwise noble verse a disagreeable twang 
of theological disputation, and did no manner of harm 
to Strauss, who had to be met on other ground and 
with other weapons, — the weapons of history and com- 



LONDON 159 

parative religion — in which Browning's skill was that 
only of a brilliant amateur. But the impulse which 
created it had deeper springs than this. What is most 
clearly personal and most deeply felt in it is the exal- 
tation of love, which seems to have determined the 
whole imaginative fabric. Love, Browning's highest 
expression of spiritual vitality, was the cardinal prin- 
ciple of his creed ; God was vital to him only as a 
loving God, and Christ only as the human embodi- 
ment and witness of God's love. The traditional 
story of Christ was in this sense of profound sig- 
nificance for him, while he turned away with indiffer- 
ence or disgust from the whole doctrinal apparatus of 
the Atonement, which, however closely bound up 
with the popular conception of God's love, had noth- 
ing to do with his conception of it, and he could thus 
consistently decline the name of Christian, as some 
witnesses aver that he did.^ It was thus in entire 
keeping with his way of approaching Christianity that 
he imagined this moving episode, — the dying apostle 
whose genius had made that way so singularly per- 
suasive, the little remnant of doomed and hunted 
fugitives who seem to belong to earth only by the 
spiritual bond of their love to him, as his own physical 
life is now a firebrand all but extinct, — " all ashes 
save the tip that holds a spark," but that still glowing 
with undiminished soul. The material fabric which 
enshrines this fine essence of the Christian spirit is 
of the frailest ; and the contrast is carried out in the 

' Other testimony, it is true, equally strong, asserts that he ac- 
cepted the name ; in any case he used it in a sense of his own. 



l6o BROWNING 

scenic setting, — the dim cool cavern, with its shadowy 
depth and faint glimmerings of day, the hushed voices, 
the ragged herbage, and the glory in the face of the 
passing saint within ; without, the hard dazzling glare 
of the desert noon, and the burning blue, and the 
implacable and triumphant might of Rome. 

The discourse of the " aged friend " is full of subtle 
and vivid thinking, and contains some of Browning's 
most memorable utterances about Love, in particular 
the noble lines — 

" For life with all it yields of joy and woe . . . 
Is just our chance of the prize of learning love, 
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is." 

Nowhere, either, do we see more clearly how this 
master-conception of his won control of his reasoning 
powers, framing specious ladders to conclusions 
towards which his whole nature yearned, but which 
his vision of the world did not uniformly bear out. 
Man loved, and God would not be above man if he 
did not also love. The horrible spectre of a God 
who has power without love never ceased to lurk in 
the background of Browning's thought, and he strove 
with all his resources of dialectic and poetry to exor- 
cise it. And no wonder. For a loving God was the 
very keystone of Browning's scheme of life and of the 
world, and its withdrawal would have meant for him 
the collapse of the whole structure. 

It is no accident that the Death in the Desert is fol- 
lowed immediately by a theological study in a very 
different key, Caliban upon Setebos. For in this bril- 



LONDON l6l 

Handy original " dramatic monologue " Caliban — the 
'^ savage man " — appears " mooting the point ' What 
is God ? ' " and constructing his answer frankly from 
his own nature. It was quite in Browning's way to 
take a humorous delight in imagining grotesque par- 
allels to ideas and processes in which he profoundly 
believed ; a proclivity aided by the curious subtle rela- 
tion between his grotesquerie and his seriousness, 
which makes Pacchiarotto^ for instance, closely similar 
in effect to parts of Christmas-Eve. Browning is one 
of three or four sons of the nineteenth century who 
dared to fill in the outlines, or to complete the half- 
told tale, of Shakespeare's Caliban.^ Renan's hero is 
the quondam disciple of Stephano and Trinculo, fin- 
ished and matured in the corrupt mob-politics of 
Europe ; a caustic symbol of democracy, as Renan 
saw it, alternately trampling on and patronising cul- 
ture. Browning's Caliban is far truer to Shake- 
speare's conception ; he is the Caliban of Shakespeare, 
not followed into a new phase but observed in a dif- 
ferent attitude, — Caliban of the days before the Storm, 
an unsophisticated creature of the island, inaccessible 
to the wisdom of Europe, and not yet the dupe of its 
vice. His wisdom, his science, his arts, are all his 
own. He anticipates the heady joy of Stephano's bot- 
tle with a mash of gourds of his own invention. And 
his religion too is his own, — no decoction from any 
of the recognised vintages of religious thought, but a 
home-made brew cunningly distilled from the teeming 

' It is characteristic that M. Maeterhnck found no place for Cali- 
ban in his striking fantasia on the Tempest, Joyzelle. 



l62 BROWNING 

animal and plant life of the Island. It is a mistake to 
call Caliban's theology a study of primitive religion ; 
for primitive religion is inseparable from the primitive 
tribe, and Caliban the savage, who has never known 
society, was a conception as unhistorical as it was ex- 
quisitely adapted to the individualist ways of Brown- 
ing's imagination. Tradition and prescription, which 
fetter the savage with iron bonds, exist for Caliban 
only in the form of the faith held by his dam, which 
he puts aside in the calm decisive way of a modern 
thinker, as one who has nothing to fear from the pen- 
alties of heresy, and has even outlived the exultation 
of free thought : 

" His dam held that the Quiet made all things 
Which Setebos vexed only : 'holds not so ; 
Who made them weak, made weakness He might vex." 

Caliban's theology has, moreover, very real points of 
contact with Browning's own. His god is that sheer 
Power which Browning from the first recognised ; it 
is because Setebos feels heat and cold, and is therefore 
a weak creature with ungratified wants, that Caliban 
decides there must be behind him a divinity that " all 
it hath a mind to, doth," Caliban is one of Brown- 
ing's most consummate realists ; he has the remorse- 
lessly vivid perceptions of a Lippo Lippi and a Sludge. 
Browning's wealth of recondite animal and plant lore 
is nowhere else so amazingly displayed ; the very 
character of beast or bird will be hit off in a line, — as 
the pie with the long tongue 



LONDON 163 

" That pricks deap into oakwarts for a worm, 
And says a plain word when she finds her prize," 

or the lumpish sea-beast which he blinded and called 
Caliban (an admirable trait) — 

" A bitter heart that bides its time and bites." 

And all this curious scrutiny is reflected in Caliban's 
god. The sudden catastrophe at the close 

(" What, what ? A curtain o'er the world at once ! ") 

is one of Browning's most superb surprises, breaking 
in upon the leisured ease of theory with the sudden- 
ness of a horrible practical emergency, and compelling 
Caliban, in the act of repudiating his theology, to pro- 
vide its most vivid illustration. 

Shakespeare, with bitter irony, brought his half- 
taught savage into touch with the scum of modern 
civilisation, and made them conspire together against 
its benignity and wisdom. The reader is apt to re- 
member this conjunction when he passes from Caliban 
to Mr. Sludge. Stephano and Trinculo, almost alone 
among Shakespeare's rascals, are drawn without 
geniality, and Sludge is the only one of Browning's 
" casuists " whom he treats with open scorn. That 
some of the effects were palpably fraudulent, and 
that, fraud apart, there remained a residuum of phe- 
nomena not easy to explain, were all irritating facts. 
Yet no one can mistake Sludge for an outflow of per- 



164 BROWNING 

sonal irritation, still less for an act of literary venge- 
ance upon the impostor who had beguiled the lofty 
and ardent intelligence of his wife. The resentful 
husband is possibly there, but so elementary an emo- 
tion could not possibly have taken exclusive possession 
of Browning's complex literary faculty, or baulked the 
eager speculative curiosity which he brought to all 
new and problematic modes of mind. His attitude 
towards spiritualism was in fact the product of 
strangely mingled conditions. Himself the most con- 
vinced believer in spirit among the poets of his time, 
he regarded the bogus demonstrations of the " spir- 
itualist " somewhat as the intellectual sceptic regards 
the shoddy logic by which the vulgar unbeliever 
proves there is no God. But even this anger had no 
secure tenure in a nature so rich in solvents for dis- 
dain. It is hard to say where scorn ends and sympathy 
begins, or where the indignation of the believer who 
sees his religion travestied passes over into the curious 
interest of the believer who recognises its dim dis- 
torted reflection in the unlikeliest quarters. But 
Sludge is clearly permitted, like Blougram before and 
Juan and Hohenstiel-Schwangau after him, to assume 
in good faith positions, or at least to use, with perfect 
sincerity, language, which had points of contact with 
Browning's own. He has an eye for " spiritual 
facts " none the less genuine in its gross way that it 
has been acquired in the course of professional train- 
ing, and is valued as a professional asset. But his 
supernaturalism at its best is devoid of spiritual qual- 
ity. His " spiritual facts " are collections of miracu- 



LONDON 165 

lous coincidences raked together by the anteater's 
tongue of a cool egoist, who waits for them 

" lazily alive, 
Open-mouthed, . . . 
Letting all nature's loosely guarded motes 
Settle and, slick, be swallowed." 

Like Caliban, who also finds the anteater an instruc- 
tive symbol, he sees " the supernatural " everywhere, 
and everywhere concerned with himself. But Cali- 
ban's religion of terror, cunning, and cajolery is more 
estimable than Sludge's businesslike faith in the virtue 
of wares for which he finds so profitable a market, and 
which he gets on such easy terms. Caliban trem- 
blingly does his best to hitch his wagon to Setebos's 
star — when Setebos is looking ; Sludge is convinced 
that the stars are once for all hitched to his waggon ; 
that heaven is occupied in catering for his appetite 
and becoming an accomplice in his sins. Sludge's 
spiritual world was genuine for him, but it had noth- 
ing but the name in common with that of the poet of 
Ben Ezra, and of the Epilogue which immediately 
follows. ^ 

This Epilogue is one of the few utterances in 

^ The foregoing account assumes that the poem was not written, 
as is commonly supposed, in Florence in 1859-60, but after his set- 
tlement in London. The only ground for the current view is Mrs. 
Browning's mention of his having been " working at a long poem " 
that winter {Letters, May 18, i860). I am enabled, by the kind- 
ness of Prof. Hall Griffin, to state that an unpublished letter from 
Browning to Buchanan in 187 1 shows this " long poem " to have 
been one on Napoleon III (cf above, p. 89). Some of it prob- 
ably appears in Hohenstiel-Schwangau. 



l66 BROWNING 

which Browning draws the ambiguous dramatic veil 
from his personal faith. That he should choose this 
moment of parting with the reader for such a confes- 
sion confirms one's impression that the focus of his 
interest in poetry now, more than ever before, lay 
among those problems of life and death, of God and 
man, to which nearly all the finest work of this col- 
lection is devoted. Far more emphatically than in 
the analogous Christmas- Eve^ Browning resolves not 
only the negations of critical scholarship but the 
dogmatic affirmations of the Churches into symptoms 
of immaturity in the understanding of spiritual 
things; in the knowledge how heaven's high with 
earth's low should intertwine. The third speaker 
voices the manifold protest of the nineteenth century 
against all theologies built upon an aloofness of the 
divine and human, whether the aloof God could be 
reached by special processes and ceremonies, or 
whether he was a bare abstraction, whose " pale 
bliss " never thrilled in response to human hearts. 
The best comment upon his faith is the saying of 
Meredith, " The fact that character can be and is de- 
veloped by the clash of circumstances is to me a 
warrant for infinite hope." ^ Only, for Browning, 
that " infinite hope " translates itself into a sense 
of present divine energies bending all the clashing 
circumstance to its benign end, till the walls of 
the world take on the semblance of the shattered 
Temple, and the crowded life within them the 
semblance of the seemingly vanished Face, which 
1 Quoted Int. Journ. of Ethics, April, 1902. 



LONDON 167 

** far from vanish, rather grows, 
Or decomposes but to recompose, 
Become my universe that feels and knows." * 

J The last line is pantheistic in expression, and has been so 
understood by some, particularly by Mr. J. M. Robertson. But 
pantheism was at most a tendency, which the stubborn concrete- 
ness of his mind held effectually in check ; a point, one might say, 
upon which his thinking converges, but which it never even 
proximately attains. God and the Soul never mingle, however 
intimate their communion (cf. chap. x. below.) 



CHAPTER VI 

THE RING AND THE BOOK 

Tout passe. — L'art robuste 
Seul a reternite. 

Le buste 
Survit a la cite. 
Et la medaille austere 
Que trouve un laboureur 

Sous terre 
Revele un empereur. 

— Gautier: VArt. 

After four years of silence, the Dramatis Persona 
was followed by The Ring and the Book. This 
monumental poem, in some respects his culminating 
achievement, has its roots in an earlier stratum of 
his life than its predecessor. There is little here to 
recall the characteristic moods of his first years of 
desolate widowerhood — the valiant Stoicism, the ac- 
ceptance of the sombre present, the great forward 
gaze upon the world beyond. We are in Italy once 
more, our senses tingle with its glowing prodigality 
of day, we jostle the teeming throng of the Roman 
streets, and are drawn into the vortex of a vast de- 
bate which seems to occupy the entire community, 
and which turns, not upon immortality, or spiritual- 
ism, or the nature of God, or the fate of man, but 
on the guilt or innocence of the actors in one pitiful 
drama, — a priest, a noble, an illiterate girl. 
i68 



THE RING AND THE BOOK. 169 

With the analytic exuberance of one to whom the 
processes of Art were yet more fascinating than its 
products, Browning has described how he discovered 
this forgotten tale and forged its glowing metal into 
the Ring. The chance finding of an " old square 
yellow book " which aroused his curiosity among the 
frippery of a Florentine stall, was as grotesquely 
casual an inception as poem ever had. But it was 
one of those accidents which, suddenly befalling a 
creative mind, organise its loose and scattered material 
with a magical potency unattainable by prolonged 
cogitation. The story of Pompilia took shape in 
the gloom and glare of a stormy Italian night of 
June, i860, as he watched from the balcony of 
Casa Guidi. The patient elaboration of after-years 
wrought into consummate expressiveness the donn'ee 
of that hour. But the conditions under which the 
elaboration was carried out were pathetically unlike 
those of the primal vision. Before the end of June 
in the following year Mrs. Browning died, and 
Browning presently left Florence for ever. For the 
moment all the springs of poetry were dried up, and 
it is credible enough that, as Mrs. Orr says. Brown- 
ing abandoned all thought of a poem, and even 
handed over his material to another. But within a 
few months, it is clear, the story of Pompilia not 
merely recovered its hold upon his imagination, but 
gathered a subtle hallowing association with what was 
most spiritual in that vanished past of which It was 
the last and most brilliant gift. The poem which 
enshrined Pompilia was thus instinct with reminis- 



1 70 BROWNING 

cence ; it was, with all its abounding vitality, yet 
commemorative *and memorial j and we understand 
how Browning, no friend of the conventions of 
poetic art, entered on and closed his giant task with 
an invocation to the " Lyric Love,'* as it were the 
Urania, or heavenly Muse, of a modern epic. 

The definite planning of the poem in its present 
shape belongs to«the autumn of 1862. In September, 
1862, he wrote to Miss Blagden from Biarritz of "my 
new poem which is about to be, and of which the 
whole is pretty well in my head — the Roman murder- 
story, you know." ^ After the completion of the 
Dramatis Personte in 1863-64, the "Roman murder- 
story " became his central occupation. To it three 
quiet early morning hours were daily given, and it 
grew steadily under his hand. For the rest he began 
to withdraw from his seclusion, to mix freely in so- 
ciety, to " live and like earth's way." He talked 
openly among his literary friends of the poem and its 
progress, rumour and speculation busied themselves 
with it as never before with work of his, and the 
literary world at large looked for its publication with 
eager and curious interest. At length, in November, 
1868, the first instaljrnent was published. It was re- 

1 W. M. Rossetti reports Browning to have told him, in a call, 
March 15, 1868, that he " began it in October, 1864, Was staying 
at Bayonne, and walked out to a mountain-gorge traditionally said 
to have been cut or kicked out by Roland, and there laid out the 
full plan of his twelve cantos, accurately carried out in the execu- 
tion." The date is presumably an error of Rossetti's for 1862 
{JiossettV s Papers y p. 302). Cf. Letter of Sept, 29, 1862 (Orr, 
P- 259). 



THE RING AND THE BOOK I7I 

ceived by the most authoritative part of the press with 
outspoken, even dithyrambic eulogies, in which the 
severely judicial Athenceum took the lead. Confirmed 
sceptics or deriders, like Edward FitzGerald, rubbed 
their eyes and tried once again, in vain, to make the 
old barbarian's verses construe and scan. To critics 
trained in classical traditions the original structure of 
the poem was extremely disturbing ; and most of 
FitzGerald's friends shared, according to him, the 
opinion of Carlyle, who roundly pronounced it 
" without Backbone or basis of Common-sense," and 
'' among the absurdest books ever written by a gifted 
Man." Tennyson, however, admitted (to Fitz- 
Gerald) that he " found greatness " in it,^ and Mr. 
Swinburne was in the forefront of the chorus of 
praise. The audience which now welcomed Brown- 
ing was in fact substantially that which had hailed 
the first fresh runnels of Mr. Swinburne's genius a 
few years before ; the fame of both marked a wave 
of reaction from the austere simplicity and attenuated 
sentiment of the later Idylls of the King. Readers 
upon whom the shimmering exquisiteness of Ar- 
thurian knighthood began to pall turned with relish to 
Browning's Italian murder-story, with its sensational 
crime, its mysterious elopement, its problem interest, 
its engaging actuality. 

And undoubtedly this was part of the attraction of 
the theme for Browning himself. He had inherited 
his father's taste for stories of mysterious crime.^ 

'^More Letters of E. F.G. 

' Cf. H. Corkran, Celebrities and I (R. Browning, senior), 1903. 



172 BROWNING 

And to the detective's interest in probing a mystery, 
which seems to have been uppermost in the elder 
Brou'ning, was added the pleader's interest in making 
out an ingenious and plausible case for each party. 
The casuist in him, the lover of argument as such, 
and the devoted student of Euripides,^ seized with 
delight upon a forensic subject which made it natural 
to introduce the various " persons of the drama," 
giving their individual testimonies and " apologies." 
He avails himself remorselessly of all the pretexts for 
verbosity, for iteration, for sophistical invention, af- 
forded by the cumbrous machinery of the law, and 
its proverbial delay. Every detail is examined from 
every point of view. Little that is sordid or revolt- 
ing is suppressed. But then it is assuredly a mistake 
to represent, with one of the liveliest of Browning's 
recent exponents, that the story was for him, even at 
the outset, in the stage of " crude fact," merely a 
common and sordid tale like a hundred others, picked 
up " at random " from a rubbish-heap to be subjected 
to the alchemy of imagination by way of showing 
the infinite worth of " the insignificant." Rather, he 
thought that on that broiling June day, a providential 
" Hand " had " pushed " him to the discovery, in that 
unlikely place, of a forgotten treasure, which he forth- 
with pounced upon with ravishment as a " prize." 
He saw in it from the first something rare, something 

' It is perhaps not without significance that in the summer sojourn 
when The Ring atid the Book was planned, Euripides was, apart 
from that, his absorbing companion. " I have got on," he writes 
to Miss Blagden, " by having a great read at Euripides, — the one 
book I brought with me." 



THE RING AND THE BOOK 1 73 

exceptional, and made wondering inquiries at Rome, 
where ecclesiasticism itself scarcely credited the truth 
of a story which told '' for once clean for the Church 
and dead against the world, the flesh, and the devil." ^ 
The metal which went to the making of the Ring^ 
and on which he poured his imaginative alloy, was 
crude and untempered, but it was gold. Its disinte- 
grated particles gleamed obscurely, as if with a chal- 
lenge to the restorative cunning of the craftsman. 
Above all, of course, and beyond all else, that arrest- 
ing gleam lingered about the bald record of the ro- 
mance of Pompilia and Caponsacchi. It was upon 
these two that Browning's divining imagination 
fastened. Their relation was the crucial point of the 
whole story, the point at which report stammered 
most lamely, and where the interpreting spirit of 
poetry was most needed " to abolish the death of 
things, deep calling unto deep." This process was 
itself, however, not sudden or simple. This first in- 
spiration was superb, visionary, romantic, — in keeping 
with " the beauty and fearfulness of that June night " 
upon the terrace at Florence, where it came to him. 

" All was sure, 
Fire laid and cauldron set, the obscene ring traced, 
The victim stripped and prostrate : what of God ? 
The cleaving of a cloud, a cry, a crash, 
Quenched lay their cauldron, cowered i' the dust the crew, 
As, in a glory of armour like Saint George, 
Out again sprang the young good beauteous priest 
Bearing away the lady in his arms 
Saved for a splendid minute and no more." ^ 

' Ring and the Booky i., 437. 2 ib., 580-588. 



174 BROWNING 

Such a vision might have been rendered without 
change in the chiselled gold and agate of the Idylls of 
the King. But Browning's hero could be no Sir 
Galahad j he had to be something less ; and also 
something more. The idealism of his nature had to 
force its way through perplexities and errors, beguiled 
by the distractions and baffled by the duties of his 
chosen career. Born to be a lover, in Dante's great 
way, he had groped through life without the vision of 
Beatrice, seeking to satisfy his blind desire, as perhaps 
Dante after Beatrice's death did also, with the lower 
love and scorning the loveless asceticism of the monk. 
The Church encouraged its priest to be " a fribble 
and a coxcomb " ; and a fribble and a coxcomb, by 
his own confession, Caponsacchi became. But the 
vanities he mingled with never quite blinded him. 
He walked in the garden of the Hesperides bent on 
great adventure, plucked in ignorance hedge-fruit and 
feasted to satiety, but yet he scorned the achievement, 
laughing at such high fame for hips and haws.^ 
Then suddenly flashed upon him the apparition, in 
the theatre, of 

« A lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad." 

The gaze burnt to his soul, and the beautiful, sad, 
strange smile haunted him night and day ; but their 
first effect was to crush and scatter all thoughts of 
love. The young priest found himself haunting the 
solemn shades of the Duomo instead of serenading 

1 Caponsacchi, ioo2 f. 



THE RING AND THE BOOK I75 

countesses ; vowed to write no more canzonets, and 
doubted much whether Marini were a better poet than 
Dante after all. His patron jocularly charged him 
with playing truant in Church all day long : — 

" ' Are you turning Molinist ? ' I answered quick : 
* Sir, what if I turned Christian ? It might be.' " 

The forged love-letters he instantly sees through. 
They are the scorpion-blotch feigned to issue miracu- 
lously from Madonna's mouth. And then Pompilia 
makes her appeal. " Take me to Rome ! " The 
Madonna has turned her face upon him indeed, " to 
summon me and signify her choice," and he at once 
receives and accepts 

" my own fact, my miracle 
Self-authorised and self-explained," 

in the presence of which all hesitation vanished, — 
nay, thought itself fell back before the tide of reveal- 
ing emotion : — 

" I paced the city : it was the first Spring. 
By the invasion I lay passive to, 
In rushed new things, the old were rapt away ; 
Alike abolished — the imprisonment 
Of the outside air, the inside weight o' the world 
That pulled me down." 

The bonds of his old existence snapped, the former 
heaven and earth died for him, and that death was the 
beginning of life : — 



176 BROWNING 

" Death meant, to spurn the ground, 
Soar to the sky, — die well and you do that. 
The very immolation made the bliss ; 
Death was the heart of life, and all the harm 
My folly had crouched to avoid, now proved a veil 
Hiding all gain my wisdom strove to grasp : 
As if the intense centre of the flame 
Should turn a heaven to that devoted fly 
Which hitherto, sophist alike and sage, 
Saint Thomas with his sober gray goose-quill, 
And sinner Plato by Cephisian reed. 
Would fain, pretending just the insect's good, 
Whisk off, drive back, consign to shade again. 
Into another state, under new rule 
I knew myself was passing swift and sure ; 
Whereof the initiatory pang approached, 
Felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet 
As when the virgin-band, the victors chaste, 
Feel at the end the earthly garments drop. 
And rise with something of a rosy shame 
Into immortal nakedness : so I 
Lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill 
Into the ecstasy and outthrob pain." 

But he presently discovered that his new task did not 
contravene, but only completed, the old ideal. The 
Church had offered her priest no alternative between 
the world and the cloister, — self-indulgence and self- 
slaughter. For ignoble passion her sole remedy was 
to crush passion altogether. She calls to the priest to 
renounce the fleshly woman and cleave to Her, the 
Bride who took his plighted troth ; but it is a scrannel 
voice sighing from stone lungs : — 

" Leave that live passion, come, be dead with me ! " 
From the exalted Pisgah of his " new state " he recog- 



THE RING AND THE BOOK 1 77 

nised that the true self-sacrifice, the perfect priest- 
hood, lay by way of life, not death, that life and death 

" Are means to an end, that passion uses both, 
Indisputably mistress of the man 
Whose form of worship is self-sacrifice." 

Yet it is not this recognition, but the " passion " 
which ultimately determines his course. Love is, for 
Browning, in his maturity, deeper and more secure 
than thought ; Caponsacchi wavers in his thinking, 
falls back upon the narrower conception of priest- 
hood, persuades himself that his duty is to serve 
God: — 

" Duty to God is duty to her : I think 
God, who created her, will save her too 
Some new way, by one miracle the more, 
Without me." 

But when once again he is confronted with the strange 
sad face, and hears once more the pitiful appeal, all 
hesitations vanish, and he sees no duty 

" Like daring try be good and true myself, 
Leaving the shows of things to the Lord of Show." 

With the security of perfect innocence he flings at 
his judges as the " final fact " — 

" In contempt for all misapprehending ignorance 
Of the human heart, much more the mind of Christ, — 
That I assuredly did bow, was blessed 
By the revelation of Pompilia." 

Thus, through all the psychologic subtlety of the por- 



1 78 BROWNING 

trait the groundwork of spiritual romance subsists. 
The militant saint of legend reappears, in the mould 
and garb of the modern world, subject to all its hamper- 
ing conditions, and compelled to make his way over 
the corpses, not of lions and dragons only, but of con- 
secrated duties and treasured instincts. And the mat- 
ter-of-course chivalry of professed knighthood is as in- 
ferior in art as in ethics to the chivalry to which this 
priest, vowed to another service, is lifted by the vision 
of Pompilia. 

Pompilia is herself, like her soldier saint, vowed to 
another service. But while he only after a struggle 
overcomes the apparent discrepancy between his duty 
as a priest and as a knight, she rises with the ease and 
swiftness of a perfectly pure and spiritual nature from 
the duty of endurance to the duty of resistance — 

" Promoted at one cry 
O' the trump of God to the new service, not 
To longer bear, but henceforth fight, be found 
Sublime in new impatience with the foe ! " ^ 

And she carries the same fearless simplicity into her 
love. Caponsacchi falters and recoils in his adorations 
of her, with the compunction of the voluptuary turned 
ascetic ; he hardly dares to call his passion by a name 
which the vulgar will mumble and misinterpret : she, 
utterly unconscious of such peril, glories in the im- 
measurable devotion 

'• Of my one friend, my only, all my own, 
"Who put his breast between the spears and me." 

» The Pope, 1057. 



THE RING AND THE BOOK 1 79 

Pompilia is steeped in the remembrance of the poet's 
"Lyric Love." Remote enough this illiterate child 
must seem from the brilliant and accomplished Eliza- 
beth Browning. But Browning's conception of his 
wife's nature had a significant affinity to his portrayal 
of Pompilia. She, he declared, was " the poet," taught 
by genius more than by experience ; he himself " the 
clever person," effectively manipulating a compre- 
hensive knowledge of life. Pompilia does indeed put 
her narrow experience to marvellous use ; her blend- 
ing of the infantine with the profound touches the 
bounds of possible consistency ; but her naive spiritual 
instinct is ever on the alert, and fills her with a per- 
petual sense of the strangeness of the things that hap- 
pen, a " childlike, wondering yet subtle perception of 
the anomalies of life." 

Spiritual simplicity has received no loftier tribute 
than from the most opulent and complex poetic intel- 
lect of our day. He loves to bring such natures into 
contrast with the cunning and cleverness of the world ; 
to show an Aprile, a David, a Pippa loosening the 
tangle of more complicated lives with a song. Pom- 
pilia is a sister of the same spiritual household as these. 
But she is a far more wonderful creation than any of 
them ; the same exquisite rarity of soul, but unfolded 
under conditions more sternly real, and winning no 
such miraculous alacrity of response. In lyrical wealth 
and swiftness Browning had perhaps advanced little 
since the days of Pippa ; but how much he had grown 
in Shakespearian realism is fairly measured by the con- 
trast between that early, half-legendary lyric child, by 



l80 BROWNING 

whose unconscious alchemy the hard hearts of Asolo 
are suddenly turned, and this later creation, whose 
power over her world, though not less real, is so much 
more slowly and hardly achieved. Her " song " is 
only the ravishing " unheard melody '* which breathes 
like incense from her inarticulate childhood. By sim- 
ple force of being what she is, she turns the priest 
into the saint, compels a cynical society to believe in 
spiritual love, and wins even from the husband who 
bought her and hated her and slew her the confession 
of his last desperate cry — 

" Pompilia, will you let them murder me ? " 

In contrast with these two, who shape their course 
by the light of their own souls, the authorised expo- 
nents of morality play a secondary and for the most 
part a sorry part. The old Pope mournfully reflects 
that his seven years' tillage of the garden of the Church 
has issued only in the " timid leaf and the uncertain 
bud," while the perfect flower, Pompilia, has sprung 
up by the wayside 'neath the foot of the enemy, " a 
mere chance-sown seed." 

" Where are the Christians in their panoply ? 
The loins we girt about with truth, the breasts 
Righteousness plated round, the shield of faith ? . . . 
Slunk into corners ! " 

The Aretine Archbishop, who thrust the suppliant 
Pompilia back upon the wolf, the Convent of Con- 
vertities, who took her in as a suffering saint, and after 
her death claimed her succession because she was of 



THE RING AND THE BOOK l8l 

dishonest life, the unspeakable Abate and Canon, 
Guido's brothers, — it is these figures who have played 
the most sinister part, and the old Pope contemplates 
them with the " terror " of one who sees his funda- 
mental assumptions shaken at the root. For here the 
theory of the Church was hard to maintain. Not only 
had the Church, whose mission it was to guide corrupt 
human nature by its divine light, only darkened and 
destroyed, but the saving love and faith had sprung 
forth at the bidding of natural promptings of the spirit, 
which its rule and law were to supersede.^ The blaze 
of " uncommissioned meteors " had intervened where 
the authorised luminaries failed, and if they dazzled, it 
was with excess of light. Was Caponsacchi blind ? 

" Ay, as a man should be inside the sun, 
Delirious with the plentitude of light." ^ 

It is easy to imagine how so grave an indictment 
would have been forced home by the author of the 
Cenci had this other, less famous, " Roman murder- 
case " fallen into his hands. The old Godwinian 
virus would have found ready material in this disas- 
trous break-down of a great institution, this magnificent 
uprising of emancipated souls. Yet, though the 
Shelleyan affinities of Browning are here visible 
enough, his point of view is clearly distinct. The 
revolutionary animus against institutions as the sole 
obstacle to the native goodness of man has wholly 
vanished ; but of historic or mystic reverence for 
them he has not a trace. He parts company with 

1 The Pope, I350 f. 2 lb., 1563. 



1 82 BROWNING 

Rousseau without showing the smallest affinity to 
Burke. As sources of moral and spiritual growth the 
State and the Church do not count. Training and 
discipline have their relative worth, but the spirit 
bloweth where it listeth, and the heights of moral 
achievement are won by those alone in whom it 
breathes the heroism of aspiration and resolve. His 
idealists grow for the most part in the interstices of 
the social organism. He recognises them, it is true, 
without difficulty even in the most central and re- 
sponsible organs of government. None of his un- 
official heroes — Paracelsus or Sordello or Rabbi ben 
Ezra — has a deeper moral insight than the aged Pope. 
But the Pope's impressiveness for Browning and for 
his readers lies just in his complete emancipation 
from the bias of his office. He faces the task of 
judgment, not as an infallible priest, but as a man, 
whose wisdom, like other men's, depends upon the 
measure of his God-given judgment, and flags with 
years. His " grey ultimate decrepitude " is fallible, 
Pope though he be ; and he naively submits the ver- 
dict it has framed to the judgment of his former self, 
the vigorous, but yet uncrowned, worker in the world. 
This summing-up of the case is in effect the poet's 
own, and is rich in the familiar prepossessions of 
Browning's individualist and unecclesiastical mind. 
He vindicates Caponsacchi more in the spirit of an 
antique Roman than of a Christian ; he has open ears 
for the wisdom of the pagan world, and toleration for 
the human Euripides ; scorn for the founder of Jesuit- 
ism, sympathy for the heretical Molinists ; and he 



THE RING AND THE BOOK 183 

blesses the imperfect knowledge which makes faith 
hard. The Pope, like his creator, is " ever a fighter," 
and his last word is a peremptory rejection of all ap- 
peals for mercy, whether in the name of policy. 
Christian forgiveness, or " soft culture," and a re- 
solve to 

" Smite with my whole strength once more, ere end my part, 
Ending, so far as man may, this offence." 

And with this solemn and final summing-up — this 
quietly authoritative key-note into which all the clash- 
ing discords seem at length to be resolved — the poem, 
in most hands, would have closed. But Browning 
was too ingrained a believer in the " oblique " meth- 
ods of Art to acquiesce in so simple and direct a con- 
clusion ; he loved to let truth struggle through devious 
and unlikely channels to the heart instead of missing 
its aim by being formally proclaimed or announced. 
Hence we are hurried from the austere solitary medi- 
tation of the aged Pope to the condemned cell of 
Guido, and have opened before us with amazing swift- 
ness and intensity all the recesses of that monstrous 
nature, its " lips unlocked " by " lucidity of soul." 
It ends, not on a solemn keynote, but in that passion- 
ate and horror-stricken cry where yet lurks the implicit 
confession that he is guilty and his doom just — 

" Pompilia, will you let them murder me ?" 

It is easy — though hardly any longer quite safe — to 
cavil at the unique structure of The Ring and the Book. 
But this unique structure, which probably never de- 



184 BROWNING 

terred a reader who had once got under way, answers 
in the most exact and expressive way to Browning's 
aims. The subject is not the story of Pompilia only, 
but the fortunes of her story, and of all stories of 
spiritual naivete such as hers, when projected upon 
the variously refracting media of mundane judgment 
and sympathies. It is not her guilt or innocence only 
which is on trial, but the mind of man in its capacity 
to receive and apprehend the surprises of the spirit. 
The issue, triumphant for her, is dubious and qualified 
for the mind of man, where the truth only at last 
flames forth in its purity. Browning even hints at 
the close that " one lesson " to be had from his work 
is the falseness of human estimation, fame, and 
speech. But for the poet who thus summed up the 
purport of his twenty thousand verses, this was not 
the whole truth of the matter. Here, as always, that 
immense, even riotous, vitality of his made the haz- 
ards and vicissitudes of the process even more precious 
than the secure triumph of the issue, and the spirit of 
poetry itself lured him along the devious ways of 
minds in which personality set its own picturesque or 
lurid tinge upon truth. The execution vindicated the 
design. Voluble, even " mercilessly voluble," the 
poet of The Ring and the Book undoubtedly is. But 
it is the volubility of a consummate master of expres- 
sion, in whose hands the difficult medium of blank 
verse becomes an instrument of Shakespearian flexi- 
bility and compass, easily answering to all the shifts 
and windings of a prodigal invention, familiar without 
being vulgar, gritty with homely detail without being 



THE RING AND THE BOOK 185 

flat ; always, at its lowest levels, touched, like a plain 
just before sunrise, with hints of ethereal light, mo- 
mentarily withheld ; and rising from time to time 
without effort to a magnificence of phrase and move- 
ment touched in its turn with that suggestion of the 
homely and the familiar which in the inmost recesses 
of Browning's genius lurked so near — so vitally near 
— to the roots of the sublime. 



CHAPTER VII 

AFTERMATH 

Which wins — Earth's poet or the Heavenly Muse ? 

— Aristophanes' Apology. 

The publication of The Ring and the Book marks in 
several ways a turning-point in Browning's career. 
Conceived and planned before the tragic close of his 
married life, and written during the first desolate years 
of bereavement, it is, more than any other of his 
greater poems, pervaded by his wife's spirit, a crown- 
ing monument to his Lyric Love. But it is also the 
last upon which her spirit left any notable trace. 
With his usual extraordinary recuperative power. 
Browning re-moulded the mental universe which her 
love had seemed to complete, and her death mo- 
mentarily to shatter, into a new, lesser completeness. 
He lived in the world, and frankly " liked earth's 
way," enjoying the new gifts of friendship and of 
fame which the years brought in rich measure. The 
little knot of critics whose praise even of Men and 
Women and Dramatis Per s once had been little more 
than a cry in the wilderness, found their voices lost 
in the chorus of admiration which welcomed the 
story of Pompilia. Some stout recalcitrants, it is 
true, like Edward FitzGerald, held their ground. 
And while the tone of even hostile criticism be- 
i86 



AFTERMATH 187 

came respectful, enough of it remained to provide 
objects, seven years later, for the uproarious chaff of 
Pacchiarotto. 

From 1869 to 187 1 Browning published nothing, 
and he appears also to have written nothing beyond a 
sonnet commemorating Helen, the mother of Lord 
Dufferin (dated April 26, 1870), almost the only set 
of fourteen lines in his works of which not one pro- 
claims his authorship. But the decade which fol- 
lowed was more prolific than any other ten years of 
his life. Between 187 1 and 1878 nine volumes in 
swift succession allured, provoked, or bewildered the 
reading world. Everything was now planned on a 
larger scale ; the vast compass and boundless 
volubility of The Ring and the Book became normal. 
He gave free rein to his delight in intricate involu- 
tions of plot and of argument ; the dramatic mono- 
logue grew into novels in verse like Red-cotton 
Night-cap Country and The Inn Album ; and the 
" special pleaders," Hohenstiel and Juan, expounded 
their cases with a complexity of apparatus unap- 
proached even by Sludge. A certain relaxation of 
poetic nerve is on the whole everywhere apparent, 
notwithstanding the prodigal display of crude intel- 
lectual power. His poetic alchemy is less potent, the 
ore of sordid fact remains sordid still. Not that his 
high spirituality is insecure, his heroic idealism 
dimmed ; but they coalesce less intimately with the 
alert wit and busy intelligence of the mere " clever 
man," and seek their nutriment and material more 
readily in regions of legend and romance, where the 



1 88 BROWNING 

transmuting work of inriagination has been already 
done. It is no accident that his lifelong delight in 
the ideal figures of Greek tragedy, so unlike his own 
creations, became in these years for the first time an 
effective source of poetry. The poems of this decade 
form thus an odd motley series — realism and romance 
interlaced but hardly blent, ^Eschylus and Euripides, 
the divine helper Herakles and the glorious embodi- 
ment of the soul of Athens, Balaustion, emerging and 
re-emerging after intervals occupied by the chicaneries 
of Miranda or the Elder Man. No inept legend for 
the Browning of this decade is the noble song of 
Thamuris which his Aristophanes half mockingly 
declaimed. "Earth's poet" and "the heavenly Muse" 
are not allies, and they at times go different ways. 

Herve Riel (published March, 1871) is less char- 
acteristic of Browning in purely literary quality than 
in the hearty helpfulness which it celebrates, and the 
fine international chivalry bv which it was inspired. 
The French disasters moved him deeply ; he had 
many personal ties with France, and was sharing with 
his dearest French friend, Joseph Milsand, as near 
neighbour, a primitive villeggiatura in a Norman 
fishing-village when the stupendous catastrophe of 
Sedan broke upon them. Sympathy with the French 
sufferers induced Browning to do violence to a 
cherished principle by offering the poem to George 
Smith for publication in The Cornhill. Most of its 
French readers doubtless heard of Herve Riel, as 
well as of Robert Browning, for the first time. His 
English readers found it hard to classify among the 



AFTERMATH 189 

naval ballads of their country, few of which had been 
devoted to celebrating the exploits of foreign sailors, 
or the deliverance of hostile fleets. But they recog- 
nised the poet of The Ring and the Book. Herve has 
no touch of Browning's " philosophy." He is none 
the less a true kinsman, in his homely fashion, of 
Caponsacchi, — summoned in a supreme emergency 
for which the appointed authorities have proved 
unequal. 

A greater tale of heroic helpfulness was presently 
to engage him. Balaustion' s Adventure was, as the 
charming dedication tells us, the most delightful of 
May-month amusements; but in the splendid proem 
which enshrines the story of Herakles and Alkestis, 
we still feel the thrill of the deadly conflict ; the agony 
of France may be partly divined in the agony of 
Athens. Thirty years before, he had shown, in the 
noble fragmentary " prologue " to a Hippolytus {^Arte- 
mis Prologi%es\ a command of the majestic, reticent 
manner of Greek tragedy sufficiently remarkable in 
one whose natural instincts of expression were far 
more Elizabethan than Greek. The incongruity of 
Greek dramatic methods with his own seems to have 
speedily checked his progress ; but Euripides, the 
author of the Greek Hippolytus^ retained a peculiar 
fascination for him, and it was on another Euripidean 
drama that he now, in the fulness of his powers, set 
his hand. The result certainly does not diminish our 
sense of the incongruity. Keenly as he admired the 
humanity and pathos of Euripides, he challenges com- 
parison with Euripides most successfully when he 



190 BROWNING 

goes completely his own way. He was too robustly 
original to " transcribe " well, and his bold emphatic 
speech, curbed to the task of reproducing the choice 
and pregnant sobriety of Attic style, is apt to eliminate 
everything but the sobriety. The " transcribed " 
Greek is often yet flatter than " literal " versions of 
Greek verse are wont to be, and when Browning 
speaks in his own person the style recovers itself with 
a sudden and vehement bound, like a noble wild 
creature abruptly released from restraint. Among the 
finest of these " recoveries " are the bursts of descrip- 
tion which Balaustion's enthusiasm interjects between 
the passages of dialogue. Such is the magnificent 
picture of the coming of Herakles. In the original 
he merely enters as the chorus end their song, ad- 
dressing them with the simple inquiry, " Friends, is 
Admetos haply within ? " to which the chorus reply, 
like civil retainers, " Yes, Herakles, he is at home." 
Browning, or his Balaustion, cannot permit the mighty 
undoer of the tragic harms to come on in this homely 
fashion. A great interrupting voice rings suddenly 
through the dispirited maunderings of Admetos' house- 
folk ; and the hearty greeting, " My hosts here ! " 
thrills them with the sense that something good and 
opportune is at hand : 

*' Sudden into the midst of sorrow leapt, 
Along with the gay cheer of that great voice 
Hope, joy, salvation : Herakles was here ! 
Himself o' the threshold, sent his voice on first 
To herald all that human and divine 
I' the weary, happy face of him, — half god, 
Half man, which made the god-part god the more." 



AFTERMATH I9I 

The heroic helpfuhiess of Herakles is no doubt the 
chief thing for Browning in the story. The large 
gladness of spirit with which he confronts the metic- 
ulous and perfunctory mourning of the stricken 
household reflected his own habitual temper with 
peculiar vividness. But it is clear that the Euripidean 
story contained an element which Browning could not 
assimilate — Admetos' acceptance of Alkestis' sacrifice. 
To the Greek the action seemed quite in order; the 
persons who really incurred his reproof were Ad- 
metos' parents, who in spite of their advanced years 
refused to anticipate their approaching death in their 
son's favour. Browning cannot away with an Ad- 
metos who, from sheer reluctance to die, allowed his 
wife to suffer death in his place; and he characteris- 
tically suggests a version of the story in which its 
issues are determined from first to last, and on both 
sides, by self-sacrificing love. Admetos is now the 
large-minded king who grieves to be called away be- 
fore his work for his people is done. Alkestis seeks, 
with Apollo's leave, to take his place, so that her lord 
may live and carry out the purposes of his soul, — 

" Nor let Zeus lose the monarch meant in thee." 

But Admetos will not allow this ; for Alkestis is as 
spirit to his flesh, and his life without her would be 
but a passive death. To which " pile of truth on 
truth " she rejoins by adding the " one truth more," 
that his refusal of her sacrifice would be in effect a 
surrender of the supreme duty laid upon him of reign- 
ing a righteous king, — that this life-purpose of his is 



192 



BROWNING 



above joy and sorrow, and the death which she will 
undergo for his and its sake, her highest good as it is 
his. And in effect, her death, instead of paralysing him, 
redoubles the vigour of his soul, so that Alkestis, liv- 
ing on in a mind made better by her presence, has not 
in the old tragic sense died at all, and finds her claim 
to enter Hades rudely rejected by '' the pensive queen 
o' the twilight," for whom death meant just to die, 
and wanders back accordingly to live once more by 
Admetos' side. Such the story became when the 
Greek dread of death was replaced by Browning's 
spiritual conception of a death glorified by love. The 
pathos and tragic forces of it were inevitably enfee- 
bled ; no Herakles was needed to pluck this Alkestis 
from the death she sought, and the rejection of her 
claim to die is perilously near to Lucianic burlesque. 
But, simply as poetry, the joyous sun-like radiance of 
the mighty spoiler of death is not unworthily replaced 
by the twilight queen, whose eyes 

" lingered still 
Straying among the flowers of Sicily," 

absorbed in the far memory of the life that Herakles 

asserted and enforced, — until, at Alkestis' summons, 

she 

" broke through humanity 
Into the orbed omniscience of a god." 

From his idealised Admetos Browning passed with 
hardly a pause to attempt the more difficult feat of 
idealising a living sovereign. Admetos was ennobled 
by presenting him as a political idealist ; the French 



AFTERMATH I93 

P2mperor, whose career had closed at Sedan, was in 
some degree qualified for a parallel operation by the 
obscurity which still invested the inmost nature of 
that well-meaning adventurer. Browning had watched 
Louis Napoleon's career with mixed feelings ; he had 
resented the coup d'etat^ and still more the annexation 
of Savoy and Nice after the war of 1859. ^^^ ^^ 
had never shared the bitter animus which prevailed at 
home. He was equally far, no doubt, from sharing 
the exalted hero-worship which inspired his wife's 
Poems before Congress. The creator of The Italian in 
England.^ of Luigi, and Bluphocks, could not but 
recognise the signal services of Napoleon to the cause 
of Italian freedom, however sharply he condemned 
the hard terms on which Italy had been compelled to 
purchase it. " It was a great action ; but he has 
taken eighteenpence for it — which is a pity " ;^ it was 
on the lines of this epigram, already quoted, that 
eleven years later he still interpreted the fallen em- 
peror, and that he now completed, as it would seem, 
the abandoned poem of i860. He saw in him a man 
of generous impulses doubled with a home politician, 
a ruler of genuine Liberal and even democratic pro- 
clivities, which the timid calculations of a second-rate 
opportunist reduced to a contemptible travesty of 
Liberalism. The shifting standpoints of such a man 
are reproduced with superfluous fidelity in his sup- 
posed Defence, which seems designed to be as elusive 
and impalpable as the character it reflects. How un- 
like the brilliant and precise realism of Blougram, six- 
1 Letters of E. B. B., ii. 385. 



194 BROWNING 

teen years before ! The upcurling cloud-rings from 
Hohenstiel's cigar seem to svmbolise something un- 
substantial and evasive in the whole fabric. The 
assumptions we are invited to form give wav one after 
another. Leicester Square proves the "• Residenz," 
the " bud-mouthed arbitress " a shadowv memon", the 
discourse to a friendlv and flattered hearer a midnight 
meditation. And there is a like fluctuation of mood. 
Now he is formally justifying his past, now musing, 
half wistfully, half ironically, over all that he might 
have been and was not. At the outset we see him 
complacently enough intrenched within a strong posi- 
tion, that of the consistent opportunist, who made the 
best of what he found, not a creator but a conserva- 
tor, " one who keeps the world safe." But he has 
ardent ideas and aspirations. The freedom of Italy 
has kindled his imagination, and in the grandest pas- 
sage of the poem he broods over his frustrate but 
deathless dream : — 

" Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught. 
Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine 
For ever ! Crumbled arch, crushed aqueduct. 
Alive with tremors in the shaggy growth 
Of wild- wood, crevice-sown, that triumphs there, 
Imparting exultation to the hills." 

But if he had abandoned these generous dreams, he 
had won free trade and given the multitude cheap 
bread, and in a highlv ingenious piece of sophistry* he 
explains, bv the aid of the gospel of Evolution, how 
men are united bv their common hunger, and thrust 
apart by their conflicting ideas. But Hohenstiel 



AFTERMATH I95 

knows very well that his intrenchments are not un- 
assailable ; and he goes on to compose an imaginary- 
biography of himself as he might have been, with 
comments which reflect his actual course. The finest 
part of this aethereal voyage is that in which his higher 
unfulfilled self pours scorn upon the paltry duplicities 
of the " Peace " policy by which his actual and lower 
self had kept on good terms abroad, and beguiled the 
imperious thirst for " la gloire " at home. Indig- 
nantly the author of Herve Riel asks why " the more 
than all magnetic race " should have to court its rivals 
by buying their goods untaxed, or guard against them 
by war for war's sake, when Mother Earth has no 
pride above her pride in that same 

" race all flame and air 
And aspiration to the boundless Great, 
The incommensurably Beautiful — 
"Whose very falterings ground ward come of flight 
Urged by a pinion all too passionate 
For heaven and v.-hat it holds of gloom and glow." 

The Ring and the Book had made Browning famous. 
But fame was far from tempting him to undue com- 
pliance with the tastes of his new-won public ; rather 
it prompted him to indulge his genius more freely, 
and to go his own way with a more complete security 
and unconcern. Hohenstiel-Schwangau — one of the 
rockiest and least attractive of all Browning's poems 
— had mystified most of its readers and been little 
relished by the rest. And now that plea for a dis- 
credited politician was followed up by what, on the 
face of it, was, as Mrs. Orr puts it, " a defence of 



196 BROWNING 

inconstancy in marriage." The apologist for Na- 
poleon III came forward as the advocate of Don 
Juan. The prefixed bit of dialogue from Moliere's 
play explains the situation. Juan, detected by his 
wife in an intrigue, is completely non-plussed. 
" Fie ! " cries Elvire, mockingly (in Browning's 
happy paraphrase), — 

" Fie ! for a man of mode, accustomed at the court 
To such a style of thing, how awkwardly my lord 
Attempts defence ! " 

In this emergency, Browning, as it would seem, steps 
in, and provides the arch-voluptuary with a philosophy 
of illicit love, quite beyond the speculative capacity 
of any Juan in literature, and glowing with poetry of 
a splendour and fertility which neither Browning him- 
self nor the great English poet who had identified his 
name with that of Juan, and whom Browning in this 
very poem overwhelms with genial banter, ever sur- 
passed. The poem inevitably challenged comparison 
with Byron's masterpiece. In dazzling play of intel- 
lect, in swift interchange of wit and passion, the 
English nineteenth century produced nothing more 
comparable to the Don yuan of Byron than Fifine at 
the Fair. 

It cannot be denied that the critics had some ex- 
cuse who, like Mortimer, frankly identified Browning 
with his hero, and described the poem as an assertion 
of the " claim to relieve the fixity of conjugal affection 
by varied adventure in the world of temporary loves." ^ 

^ Mrs, Orr, Life, p. 297. Her own criticism is, however, curi- 
ously indecisive and embarrassed. 



AFTERMATH I97 

For Browning has not merely given no direct hint of 
his own divergence from Juan, corresponding to his 
significant comment upon Blougram — " he said true 
things but called them by false names " ; he has made 
his own subtlest and profoundest convictions on life 
and art spring spontaneously from the brain of this 
brilliant conqueror of women. Like Goethe's Faust, 
he unmistakably shares the mind, the wisdom, the 
faith, of his creator j it is plausible to suppose that 
the poet indorses his application of them. This is 
unquestionably a complete mistake ; but Browning, 
as usual, presumed too much upon his readers' insight, 
and took no pains to obviate a confusion which he 
clearly supposed to be impossible. 

It was on the strand at Pornic that he encountered 
the fateful gipsy whom he calls Fifine. Arnold, years 
before, had read unutterable depths of soul in another 
gipsy child by another shore. For Browning now, as 
in the days of the Flight of the Duchess^ the gipsy sym- 
bolised the life of joyous detachment from the con- 
straints of society and civilisation. The elementary 
mood, out of which the wondrous woof of reasonings 
and images is evolved, is simply the instinctive beat of 
the spirit of romance in us all, in sympathy with these 
light-hearted losels of the wild, who " cast allegiance 
ofF, play truant, nor repine," and though disgraced but 
seem to relish life the more. 

The beautiful Prologue — one of the most original 
lyrics in the language — strikes the key-note : — 



198 BROWNING 

" Sometimes, when the weather 
Is blue, and warm waves tempt 
To free oneself of tether, 
And try a life exempt 

" From worldly noise and dust, 
In the sphere which overbrims 
"With passion and thought, — why, just 
Unable to fly, one swims. . . . 

" Emancipate through passion 

And thought, — with sea for sky, 
We substitute, in a fashion. 
For heaven — poetry." 

It is this " emancipation " from our confinement in 
the bonds of prose, commonplace, and routine, by a 
passion and thought-winged imagination, which is the 
true subject of the poem. But he chooses to convey 
his meaning, as usual, through the rich refracting 
medium of dramatic characters and situations quite 
unlike his own. So his ^^ apology for poetry " becomes 
an item in Don Juan's case for the " poetry " of dalli- 
ance with light-o'-loves. Fifine herself acquires new 
importance ; the emancipated gipsy turns into the pert 
seductive coquette, while over against her rises the 
pathetic shadow of the "wife in trouble," her white 
fingers pressing Juan's arm, " ravishingly pure " in her 
" pale constraint." Between these three persons the 
moving drama is played out, ending, like all Don Juan 
stories, with the triumph of the baser influence. Elvire, 
with her eloquent silences and wistful pathos, is an 
exquisite creation, — a wedded sister of Shakespeare's 
Hero ; Fifine, too, with her strutting bravado and " pose 
half frank, half fierce," shrills her discordant note 



AFTERMATH I99 

vivaciously enough. The principal speaker himself is- 
the most complex of Browning's casuists, a marvel- 
lously rich and many-hued piece of portraiture. This 
Juan is deeply versed in all the activities of the imagi- 
nation which he so eloquently defends. Painting and 
poetry, science and philosophy, are at his command ; 
above all, he is an artist and a poet in the lore of 
Love. 

It is easy to see that the kind of adventure on which 
Juan claims the right of projecting his imagination has 
close affinities with the habitual procedure of Brown- 
ing's own. Juan defends his dealings with the gay 
fizgig Fifine as a step to the fuller appreciation of 
Elvire ; he demands freedom to escape only as a means 
of possessing more surely and intimately what he has. 
And Browning's " emancipation " is not that of the 
purely Romantic poet, who pursues a visionary ab- 
straction remote from all his visible environment. 
The emancipated soul, for him, was rather that which 
incessantly " practised with " its environment, fight- 
ing its way through countless intervening films of 
illusion to the full knowledge of itself and of all that it 
originally held in posse. This might not be an ade- 
quate account of his own artistic processes, in which 
genial instinct played a larger, and resolute will a 
smaller, part than his invincible athleticism of temper- 
ament would suggest. But his marvellous wealth of 
spontaneous vision was fed and enriched by incessant 
"practice with " his environment; his idealism was 
vitalised by the ceaseless play of eye and brain upon 
the least promising mortal integuments of spirit ; he 



200 BROWNING 

possessed " Elvire " the more securely for having 
sent forth his adventurous imagination to practise upon 
innumerable Fifines. 

The poem itself — as a defence of his poetic methods 
— was an " adventure '* in which imagination played 
an unusually splendid part. A succession of brilliant 
and original images, visions, similes, parables, exhibits 
the twofold nature of the "stuff" with which the 
artist plays, — its inferiority, its poverty, its "falseness " 
in itself, its needfulness, its potency, its worth for him. 
It is the water which supports the swimmer, but in 
which he cannot live \ the dross of straw and chaff 
which yields the brilliant purity of flame (c. 55); the 
technical cluster of sounds from which issues " music 
— that burst of pillared cloud by day and pillared fire 
by night" (c. 41). The whole poem is haunted by 
the sense of dissonance which these images suggest 
between the real and the apparent meaning of things. 
Browning's world, else so massive and so indubitable, 
becomes unsubstantial and phantasmal, an illusive 
pageant in which Truth is present only under a mask, 
being " forced to manifest itself through falsehood." 
Juan, who declares that, unlike poets, " we prose- 
folk " always dream, has, in effect, a visionary quality 
of imagination which suits his thesis and his theme. 
The " dream figures " of the famous ladies pass before 
us like a gorgeous tapestry, — some rich Venetian ren- 
dering of a medieval ballade du temps jadis ; then Ven- 
ice itself opens before us, all moving life and colour, 
under the enchantment of Schumann's Carnival^ only 
to resolve itself into a vaster pageant of the world, 



AFTERMATH 201 

with its mighty fanes of art and science, which, seem- 
ingly " fixed as fate, not fairy-work,'* yet 

" tremblingly grew blank 
From bright, then broke afresh in triumph, — ah, but sank 
As soon, for liquid change through artery and vein 
O' the very marble wound its way." 

The August of 1872 found Browning and his sister 
once more in France. This time, however, not at 
Croisic but Saint Aubin — the primitive hamlet on the 
Norman coast to which he had again been drawn by 
his attachment to Joseph Milsand. At a neighbour- 
ing village was another old friend. Miss Thackeray, 
who has left a charming account of the place. They 
walked along a narrow cliff-path : " The seacoast 
far below our feet, the dried, arid vegetation of the 
sandy way, the rank yellow snapdragon lining the 
paths. . . . We entered the Brownings* house. 
The sitting-room door opened to the garden and the 
sea beyond — a fresh-swept bare floor, a table, three 
straw chairs, one book upon the table." A misunder- 
standing, now through the good offices of Milsand 
happily removed, had clouded the friendship of 
Browning and Miss Thackeray ; and his joyous re- 
vulsion of heart has left characteristic traces in the 
poem which he dedicated to his " fair friend." The 
very title is jest — an outflow of high spirits in an ex- 
uberantly hearty hand-shake — " British man with 
British maid " ; the country of the " Red-cotton 
Night-cap " being in fact, of course, the country 
which her playful realism had already nicknamed 



202 BROWNING 

" White-cotton Night-cap Country," from the white 
lawn head-dress of the Norman women. Nothing so 
typical and every-day could set Browning's imagina- 
tion astir, and among the wilderness of white, inno- 
cent and flavourless, he caught at a story which 
promised to be " wrong and red and picturesque," 
and vary " by a splotch the righteous flat of 
insipidity." 

The story of Miranda the Paris jeweller and his 
mistress, Clara de Millefleurs, satisfied this condition 
sufficiently. Time had not mellowed the raw crudity 
of this " splotch," which Browning found recorded in 
no old, square, yellow vellum book, but in the French 
newspapers of that very August; the final judgment 
of the court at Caen ("Vire") being actually pro- 
nounced while he wrote. The poet followed on the 
heels of the journalist, and borrowed, it must be 
owned, not a little of his methods. If any poem of 
Browning's may be compared to versified special cor- 
respondence, it is this. He tells the story, in his own 
person, in blank verse of admirable ease and fluency, 
from which every pretence of poetry is usually re- 
mote. What was it in this rather sordid tale that 
arrested him ? Clearly the strangely mingled char- 
acter of Miranda. Castile and Paris contend in his 
blood ; and his love adventures, begun on the boule- 
vards and in their spirit, end in an ecstasy of fantastic 
devotion. His sins are commonplace and prosaic 
enough, but his repentances detach him altogether 
from the herd of ordinary penitents as well as of 
ordinary sinners — confused and violent gesticulations 



AFTERMATH 2O3 

of a visionary ascetic struggling to liberate himself 
from the bonds of his own impurity. " The heart 
was wise according to its lights " ; but the head was 
incapable of shaping this vague heart-wisdom into 
coherent practice. A parallel piece of analysis pre- 
sents Clara as a finished artist in life — a Meissonier 
of limited but flawless perfection in her unerring se- 
lection of means to ends. In other words, this not 
very attractive pair struck Browning as another ex- 
ample of his familiar contrast between those who 
" try the low thing and leave it done," and those who 
aim higher and fail. Yet it must be owned that these 
Browningesque ideas are not thoroughly wrought into 
the substance of the poem ; they are rather a sort of 
marginal embroidery woven on to a story which, as a 
whole, has neither been shaped by Browning's hand 
nor vitalised with his breath. Neither Clara nor 
Miranda can be compared in dramatic force with his 
great creations ; even Clara's harangue to the Cous- 
inry, with all its passion and flashing scorn, is true 
rather to her generic character as the injured champion 
of her dead lord than to her individual variety of it — 
the woman of subtle, inflexible, yet calculating de- 
votion. Miranda's soliloquy before he throws himself 
from the Tower is a powerful piece of construction, 
but, when the book is closed, what we seem to see 
in it is not the fantastical goldsmith surveying the mo- 
tives of his life, but Browning filling in the bizarre out- 
lines of his construction with appropriate psychological 
detail. Another symptom of decline in Browning's 
most characteristic kind of power is probably to be 



204 BROWNING 

found in the play of symbolism which invests with an 
air of allegorical abstraction the " Tower " and the 
" Turf," and makes the whole poem, with all its pro- 
saic realism, intelligibly regarded as a sort of fantasia 
on self-indulgence and self-control. 

The summer retreat of 1874 was found once more 
on the familiar north coast of France, — this time at 
the quiet hamlet of Mers, near Treport. In this 
lonely place, with scarcely a book at hand, he wrote 
the greater part of the most prodigally and exuber- 
antly learned of all his poems — Aristophanes^ Apology 
(published April, 1875). It was not Browning's way 
to repeat his characters, but the story of Balaustion, 
the brilliant girl devotee of Euripides, had proved an 
admirable setting for his interpretations of Greek 
drama ; and the charm of that earlier " most delight- 
ful of May-month amusements " was perhaps not the 
less easily revived in these weeks of constant com- 
panionship with a devoted woman-friend of his own. 
Balaustion is herself full ten years older than at the 
time of her first adventure ; her fresh girlish enthusi- 
asm has ripened into the ardent conviction of intel- 
lectual maturity ; she can not only cite Euripides, but 
vindicate his art against his mightiest assailant. Situ- 
ation, scenery, language, are here all more complex. 
The first Adventure was almost Greek in its radiant 
and moving simplicity ; the last is Titanically Brown- 
ingesque, a riot of the least Hellenic elements of 
Browning's mind with the uptorn fragments of the 
Hellenic world. Moreover, the issue is far from be- 
ing equally clear. The glory of Euripides is still the 



AFTERMATH 2O5 

ostensible theme ; but Aristophanes had so many 
points of contact with Browning himself, and ap- 
peals in his defence to so many root-ideas of Brown- 
ing's own, that the reader hesitates between the poet 
to whom Browning's imagination allied him, and the 
poet whom his taste preferred. His Aristophanes is, 
like himself, the poetry of " Life," a broad and gen- 
erous realist, who like Lippo Lippi draws all existence 
into his art ; an enemy of all asceticisms and abstrac- 
tions, who drives his meaning home through vivid 
concrete example and drastic phrase, rather than by 
enunciating the impressive moral commonplaces of 
tragic poetry.^ Aristophanes, too, had been abused 
for his " unintelligible " poetry, — '' mere psychologic 
puzzling," ^ — by a " chattering " public which pre- 
ferred the lilt of nursery rhymes. The magnificent 
portrait of Aristophanes is conceived in the very 
spirit of the riotous exuberance of intellect and 
senses — 

" Mind a-wantoning 
At ease of undisputed mastery 
Over the body's brood " — 

which was so congenial to the realist in Browning ; 
" the clear baldness — all his head one brow " — and 
the surging flame of red from cheek to temple ; the 
huge eyeballs rolling back native fire, imperiously 
triumphant, the " pursed mouth's pout aggressive," 
and " the beak supreme above," " beard whitening 
under like a vinous foam." 

1 Arist. Ap., p. 698. 2 lb., p. 688. 



206 BROWNING 

Balaustion is herself the first to recognise the 
divinity shrouded in this half satyr-like form : in some 
of the finest verses of the poem she compares him 
to the sea-god, whom as a child she had once seen 
peer 

" large-looming from his wave, 
* ^t -x- * * ♦ 

A sea-worn face, sad as mortality. 
Divine with yearning after fellowship," 

while below the surface all was " tail splash, frisk of 
fin." And when Balaustion has recited her poet's 
masterpiece of tragic pathos, Aristophanes lays aside 
the satirist a moment and attests his affinity to the 
divine poets by the noble song of Thamyris. The 
" transcript from Euripides " itself is quite secondary 
in interest to this vivid and powerful dramatic frame- 
work. Far from being a vital element in the action, 
like the recital of the Alkestis^ the reading of the 
Hercules Furens is an almost gratuitous diversion in 
the midst of the talk ; and the tameness of a literal 
(often awkwardly literal) translation is rarely broken 
by those inrushes of alien genius which are the glory 
of Browning's Alkestis. Yet the very self-restraint 
sprang probably from Browning's deep sensibility to 
the pathos of the story. " Large tears," as Mrs. Orr 
has told us, fell from his eyes, and emotion choked 
his voice, when he first read it aloud to her.. 

The Inn Album is, like Red-cotton Night-cap Coun- 
try^ a versified novel, melodramatic in circumstances, 
frankly familiar in scenery and atmosphere. Once 



AFTERMATH 207 

more, as in the Blot in the ''Scutcheon^ and in 'James 
Lee's IVife^ Browning turned for his " incidents in 
the development of souls " to the passion and sin- 
frayed lives of his own countrymen. But no halo 
of seventeenth-century romance here tempers the 
sordid modernity of the facts; the "James Lee" of 
this tragedy appears in person and is drawn with re- 
morseless insistence on every mean detail which an- 
nounces the "■ rag-and-feather hero-sham." Every- 
thing except his wit and eloquence is sham and 
shabby in this Club-and-Country-house villain, who 
violates more signally than any figure in poetic 
literature the canon that the contriver of the tragic 
harms must not be totally despicable. A thief, as 
Schiller said, can qualify for a tragic hero only by 
adding to his theft the more heroic crime of murder; 
but Browning's Elder Man compromises even the 
professional perfidies of a Don Juan with shady deal- 
ings at cards and the like which Don Juan himself 
would have scouted. In F'lfine the Don Juan of 
tradition was lifted up into and haloed about with 
poetical splendours not his own ; here he is depressed 
into an equally alien sorriness of prose. But the 
decisive and commanding figure, for Browning and 
for his readers, is of course his victim and Nemesis, 
the Elder Lady. She is as unlike Pompilia as he is 
unlike Guido ; but we see not less clearly how the 
upleaping of the soul of womanhood in the child, 
under the stress of foul and cruel wrongs, has once 
more asserted its power over him. And if Pompilia 
often recalls his wife, the situation of the Elder Lady 



208 BROWNING 

may fairly remind us of that of Marion Erie in 
Aurora Leigh. But many complexities in the work- 
ing out mark Browning's design. The betrayed girl, 
scornfully refusing her betrayer's tardy offer of mar- 
riage, has sought a refuge, as the wife of a clergyman, 
in the drudger)^ of a benighted parish. The chance 
meeting of the two, four years after, in the inn 
parlour, their bitter confessions, through the veil of 
mutual hatred, that life has been ruined for both, — 
he, with his scandalous successes growing at last 
notorious, she, the soul which once '' sprang at love," 
now sealed deliberately against beauty, and spent in 
preaching monstrous doctrines which neither they 
nor their savage parishioners believe nor observe, 
— all this is imagined very powerfully and on 
lines which would hardly have occurred to any one 
else. 

The Pacchiarotto volume forms a kind of epilogue 
to the work of the previous half-dozen years. Since 
The Ring and the Book he had become a famous per- 
sonage ; his successive poems had been everywhere 
reviewed at length ; a large public was genuinely in- 
terested in him, while a vet larger complained of his 
" obscurity," but did not venture to ignore him, and 
gossiped eagerlv about his private life. He himself, 
mingling freelv, an ever-welcome guest, in the 
choicest London society, had the air of having 
accepted the world as cordiallv as it on the whole 
accepted him. Yet barriers remained. Poems like the 
Red-cotton Night-cap Country^ the Inn Album., and 
Fifine had alienated many whom The Ring and the 



AFTERMATH 2O9 

Book had won captive, and embarrassed the defence 
of some of Browning's staunchest devotees. No- 
body knew better than the popular diner-out, Robert 
Browning, how few of the men and women who 
listened to his brilliant talk had any grip upon his 
inner mind ; and he did little to assist their insight. 
The most affable and accessible of men up to a cer- 
tain point, he still held himself, in the deeper matters 
of his art, serenely and securely aloof. But it was a 
good-humoured, not a cynical, aloofness, which found 
quite natural expression in a volley of genial chaff at 
the critics who thought themselves competent to 
teach him his business. This is the main, at least 
the most dominant, note of Pacchiarotto. It is like an 
aftermath of Aristophanes' Apology. But the English 
poet scarcely deigns to defend his art. No beautiful 
and brilliant woman is there to put him on his mettle 
and call out his chivalry. The mass of his critics 
are roundly made game of, in a boisterously genial 
sally, as " sweeps " officiously concerned at his 
excess of " smoke." Pacchiarotto is a whimsical tale 
of a poor painter who came to grief in a Quixotic 
effort to "reform" his fellows. Rhyme was never 
more brilliantly abused than in this tour de force ^ in 
which the clang of the machinery comes near to 
killing the music. More seriously, in the finely 
turned stanzas At the Mermaid^ and House^ he avails 
himself of the habitual reticence of Shakespeare to 
defend by implication his own reserve, not without 
a passing sarcasm at the cost of the poet who took 
Europe by storm with the pageant of his broken 



210 BROWNING 

heart. House is for the most part rank prose, but it 
sums up incisively in the well-known retort : 

" < With this same key 
Shakespeare unlocked his hearty once more ! 

Did Shakespeare ? If so, the less Shakespeare he ! " 

This " house " image is singularly frequent in this 
volume. The poet seems haunted by the idea of the 
barrier walls, which keep ofF the public gaze, but ad- 
mit the privileged spirit. In Fears and Scruples it 
symbolises the reticence of God. In Appearances the 
"poor room" in which troth was plighted and the 
" rich room " in which " the other word was spoken '* 
become half human in sympathy. A woman's " nat- 
ural magic " makes the bare walls she dwells in a 
" fairy tale " of verdure and song. The prologue 
seems deliberately to strike this note, with its exquisite 
idealisation of the old red brick wall and its creepers 
lush and lithe, — a formidable barrier mdeed, but one 
which spirit and love can pass. For here the " wall " 
is the unsympathetic throng who close the poet in ; 
there 

" I — prison-bird, with a ruddy strife 

At breast, and a life whence storm-notes start — 
Hold on, hope hard in the subtle thing 

That's spirit : though cloistered fast, soar free ; 
Account as wood, brick, stone, this ring 

Of the rueful neighbours, and — forth to thee ! " 

These stanzas finely hint at a second theme which 
wanders in and out among the strident notes of 
Browning's anti-critical " apologetics." Of all the 



AFTERMATH 211 

springs of poetry none lay deeper in Browning than 
love ; to the last he could sing of love with the full 
inspiration of his best time ; and the finest things in 
this volume are concerned with it. But as compared 
with the love-lays of the Dramatic Lyrics or Men and 
Women there is something wistful, far ofF, even elegiac, 
in this love-poetry. A barrier, undefinable but im- 
passable, seems to part us from the full tide of youth- 
ful passion. The richest in this tender sunset beauty 
is the St. Martinis Summer.^ where the late love is sud- 
denly smitten with the discovery that its apparent 
warmth is a ghost of old passion buried but unallayed. 
Again and again Browning here dwells upon the 
magic of love, — as if love still retained for the ageing 
poet an isolated and exceptional irradiating power in 
a world fast fading into commonplace and prose. 
The brief, exquisite snatches of song. Natural Magic.^ 
Magical Nature^ are joyous tributes to the power of 
the charm, paid by one who remains master of his 
heart. Numpholeptos is the long-drawn enchanted 
reverie of one in the very toils of the spell — a thing 
woven of dreams and emotions, dark-glowing, irides- 
cent to the eye, languorous to the ear, impalpable to 
the analytic intellect. In Bifurcation he puts again, 
with more of subtlety and of detachment, the problem 
of the conventional conflict of love with duty, so 
peremptorily decided in love's favour in The Statue 
and the Bust. A Forgiveness is a powerful reworking 
of the theme of My Last Duchess^ with an added 
irony of situation : Browning, who excels in the 
drama of silent figures, has drawn none more effective 



212 BROWNING 

than this guilty priest, who grinds his teeth behind the 
confessional grating as he listens perforce to the story 
of his own crime from the lips of the wronged hus- 
band, still cherishing the hope that he is unrecognised, 
or at the worst may elude vengeance in his cloister's 
solitude ; until the avenger's last words throw off the 
mask : — 

" Hardly, I think ! As little helped his brow 
The cloak then, Father — as your grate helps now ! " 

P'rom these high matters of passion and tragedy we 
pass by easy steps into the jocular-colloquial region in 
which the volume opened. Painting in these later 
days of Browning's has ceased to yield high, or even 
serious poetry, and Baldinucci's tale of shabby trick- 
ery cannot be compared, even for grotesque humour, 
with the powerful grotesquerie of Holy-Cross Day^ 
while it wholly lacks the great lift of Hebraic sublim- 
ity at the close. The Epilogue returns to the com- 
bative apologetics of the title poem ; but, unlike that, 
does attempt some reply to the cavils of the discon- 
tented. They cannot have the strong and the sweet 
— body and bouquet — at once, he tells them in effect, 
and he chooses to be strong, to give the good grape 
and leave the cowslips growing in the meadow. The 
argument was but another sally of the poet's good- 
humoured chaff, and would not have stood the scru- 
tiny of his subtler mind. Doubtless he, like Ben 
Jonson, inclined to see signs of the " strong " in the 
astringent and the gritty ; but no one knew better, 
when he chose, to wed his " strength " with " sweet- 



AFTERMATH 



213 



ness." The falling-ofF of the present volume com- 
pared with Men and Women or Dramatis Personce lay 
less in the lack of either quality than in his failure to 
bring them together. Of the " stiff brew " there is 
plenty ; but the choicest aroma comes from that 
" wine of memories " — the fragrant reminiscences — 
which the poet affected to despise. The epilogue 
ends, incorrigibly, with a promise to " posset and 
cosset " the cavilling reader henceforward with " net- 
tle-broth," good for the sluggish blood and the disor- 
dered stomach. 

The' following year brought a production which the 
cavilling reader might excusably regard as a fulfilment 
of this jocose threat. For the translation of the 
Agamemnon (1877) was not in any sense a serious 
contribution to the English knowledge and love of 
Greek drama. The Balaustion " transcripts " had 
betrayed an imperfect sensibility to the finer qualities 
of Greek dramatic style. But Browning seems to 
have gone to work upon the greatest of antique trage- 
dies with the definite intention of showing, by a ver- 
sion of literal fidelity, how little the Greek drama at 
its best owed to Greek speech. And he has little 
difficulty in making the oracular brevity of ^Eschylus 
look bald, and his sublime incoherences frigid.' The 
result is, nevertheless, very interesting and instructive 
to the student of Browning's mind. Nowhere else 

1 It is hard to explain how Browning came also to choose his 
restless hendecasyllables as a medium for the stately iambic of 
iEschylus. It is more like Fletcher outdoing himself in doublt 
endings. 



214 BROWNING 

do we feel so acutely how foreign to his versatile and 
athletic intellect was the primitive and elemental 
imagination which interprets the heart and the con- 
science of nations. His acute individualism in effect 
betrayed him, and made his too faithful translation 
resemble a parody of this mighty fragment of the 
mind of Themistoclean Athens by one of the brilliant 
irresponsible Sophists of the next generation. 

The spring and summer of 1877 were not pro- 
ductive. The summer holiday was spent in a new 
haunt among the Savoy Alps, and Browning missed 
the familiar stimulus of the sea-air. But the early 
autumn brought an event which abruptly shattered his 
quiescence, and called forth, presently, the most inti- 
mately personal poem of his later years. Miss Ann 
Egerton-Smith, his gifted and congenial companion at 
London concerts, and now, for the fourth year in suc- 
cession, in the summer villeggiatura^ died suddenly of 
heart disease at dawn on Sept. 14, as she was preparing 
for a mountain expedition with her friends. It was 
not one of those losses which stifle thought or sweep it 
along on the vehement tide of lyric utterance; it was 
rather of the kind which set it free, creating an at- 
mosphere of luminous serenity about it, and allaying 
all meaner allurements and distractions. Elegy is 
often the outcome of such moods ; and the elegiac 
note is perceptible in the grave music of La Saisiax. 
Yet the poem as a whole does not even distantly re- 
call, save in the quiet intensity of its ground tone, the 
noble poems in which Milton or Shelley, Arnold or 
Tennyson, commemorated their dead friends. He 



AFTERMATH 215 

himself commemorated no other dead friend in a way 
like this; to his wife's memory he had given only the 
sacred silence, the impassioned hymn, the wealth of 
poetry inspired by her spirit but not addressed to her. 
This poem, also, was written "once, and only once, 
and for one only." La Saisaiz recalls to us, per- 
versely perhaps, poems of his in which no personal 
sorrow beats. The glory of the dawn and the moun- 
tain-peak — Saleve with its outlook over the snowy 
splendour of Mont Blanc — instils itself here into the 
mourner's mood, as, long before, a like scene had ani- 
mated the young disciples of the Grammarian ; while 
the " cold music " of Galuppi's Toccata seems to be 
echoed inauspiciously in these lingering trochaics. 
Something of both moods survives, but the dominant 
tone IS a somewhat grey and tempered hope, remote 
indeed from the oppressive sense of evanescence, the 
crumbling mortality, of the second poem, remote no 
less from the hushed exaltation, the subdued but rap- 
turous confidence of the first. 

The poet is growing old ; the unity of poetic vision 
is breaking up into conflicting aspects only to be ad- 
justed in the give and take of debate; he puts oflF his 
singing robes to preside as moderator, while Fancy 
and Reason exchange thrust and parry on the problem 
of immortality ; delivering at last, as the " sad sum- 
ming up of all," a balanced and tentative affirmation. 
And he delivers the decision with an oppressive sense 
that it is but his own. He is " Athanasius contra 
mundum " ; and he dwells, with a " pallid smile " 
which Athanasius did not inspire, upon the mar- 



2l6 BROWNING 

vellous power of fame. Nay, Athanasius himself 
has his doubts. Even his sober hope is not a secure 
possession ; but in the gloom of London's November 
he remembers that he had hoped in the sunset glory 
of Saleve, and " saves up " the memory of that preg- 
nant hour for succour in less prosperous times. 

The Two Poets of Croisic^ published with La Saisaiz^ 
cannot be detached from it. The opening words take 
up the theme of " Fame," there half mockingly played 
with, and the whole poem is a sarcastic criticism of 
the worship of Fame. The stories of Rene Gentil- 
homme and Paul Desfarges Maillard are told with an 
immense burly vivacity, in the stanza, and a Brown- 
ingesque version of the manner, of Beppo. Both 
stories turned upon those decisive moments which 
habitually caught Browning's eye. Only, in their 
case, the decisive moment was not one of the reveal- 
ing crises which laid bare their utmost depths, but a 
crisis which temporarily invested them with a capri- 
cious effulgence. Yet these instantaneous transforma- 
tions have a peculiar charm for Browning ; they touch 
and fall in with his fundamental ideas of life ; and the 
delicious prologue and epilogue hint these graver 
analogies in a dainty music which pleasantly relieves 
the riotous uncouthness of the tale itself. If Rene's 
life is suddenly lighted up, so is the moss bank with 
the " blue flash " of violets in spring ; and the diplo- 
matic sister through whose service Paul wins his laurels 
has a more spiritual comrade in the cicada, who, with 
her little heart on fire, sang forth the note of the 
broken string and won her singer his prize. Brown- 



AFTERMATH 21 7 

ing's pedestrian verse passes into poetry as he disen- 
gages from the transient illusions, the flickerings and 
bickerings, of Fame, the eternal truth of Love. But 
it is only in the closing stanzas of the main poem 
that his thought clearly emerges ; when, having ex- 
posed the vanity of fame as a test of poetic merit, he 
asks how, then, poets shall be tried; and lays down 
the characteristic criterion, a happy life. But it is the 
happiness of Rabbi ben Ezra, a joy three parts pain, 
the happiness won not by ignoring evil but by mas- 
tering it ! — 

** So, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force : 

What then ? since Swiftness gives the charioteer 

The palm, his hope be in the vivid horse 
Whose neck God clothed with thunder, not the steer 

Sluggish and safe ! Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse, 
Despair : but ever mid the whirling fear 

Let, through the tumult, break the poet's face 

Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race ! " 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE LAST DECADE 
Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiled. 

Since the catastrophe of 1861 Browning had not en- 
tered Italy. In the autumn of 1878 he once more 
bent his steps thither. Florence, indeed, he refused 
to revisit ; it was burnt in upon his brain by memories 
intolerably dear. But in Venice the charm of Italy 
reasserted itself, and he returned during his remaining 
autumns with increasing frequency to the old-fash- 
ioned hostelry, DelF Universo, on the Grand Canal, 
or latterly, to the second home provided by the hospi- 
tality of his gifted and congenial American friend, 
Mrs. Arthur Bronson. Asolo, too, the town of Pippa, 
he saw again, after forty years' absence, with poignant 
feelings, — " such things have begun and ended with 
me in the interval ! " But the poignancy of memory 
did not restore the magic of perception which had 
once been his. The mood described ten years later 
in the Prologue to Asolando was already dominant : the 
iris glow of youth no longer glorified every common 
object of the natural world, but " a flower was just a 
flower." The glory still came by moments ; some 
of his most thrilling outbursts of song belong to this 
time. But he built up no more great poems. He 
was approaching seventy, and it might well seem that 
218 



THE LAST DECADE 219 

if SO prolific a versifier was not likely to become silent 
his poetry was rapidly resolving itself into wastes of 
theological argument, of grotesque posturing, or in- 
tellectualised anecdotage. The Dramatic Idyls of 1879 
and 1880 showed that these more serious forebodings 
were at least premature. There was little enough in 
them, no doubt, of the qualities traditionally con- 
nected with " idyll.** Browning habitually wore his 
rue with a difference, and used familiar terms in senses 
of his own. There is nothing here of "enchanted 
reverie " or leisurely pastoralism. Browning's " idyls '* 
are studies in life's moments of stress and strain, not 
in its secluded pleasances and verdurous wooded 
ways. It is for the most part some new variation of 
his familiar theme — the soul taken in the grip of a 
tragic crisis, and displaying its unsuspected deeps and 
voids. Not all are of this kind, however; and while 
his keenness for intense and abnormal effects is as 
pronounced as ever, he seeks them in an even more 
varied field. Italy, the main haunt of his song, yields 
— it can hardly be said to have inspired — one only of 
the Idyls — Pietro of Ahano. Old memories of Russia 
are furbished up in Ivan Ivanovitch^ odd gatherings 
from the byways of England and America in Ned 
Bratts^ Halbert and Hoh^ Martin Relph ; and he 
takes from Virgil's hesitating lips the hint of a joyous 
pagan adventure of the gods, and tells it with his own 
brilliant plenitude and volubility. The mythic treat- 
ment of nature had never appealed much to Brown- 
ing, even as a gay decorative device ; he was pres- 
ently to signalise his rejection of it in Gerard de 



220 BROWNING 

Lairesse^ a superb example of what he rejected. In 
all mythology there was something foreign to the 
tenacious humanity of his intellect ; he was most open 
to its appeal where it presented divinity stretching 
forth a helping hand to man. The noble " idyl " of 
Echetlos is thus a counterpart, in its brief way, to the 
great tragic tale of Herakles and Alkestis. Echetlos, 
the mysterious ploughman who shone amid the ranks 
at Marathon, 

" clearing Greek earth of weed 
As he routed through the Sabian and rooted up the Mede," 

is one of the many figures which thrill us with Brown- 
ing's passion for Greece, and he is touched with a 
kind of magic which it did not lie in his nature often 
to communicate. But the great successes of the Dra- 
matic Idyls are to be found mainly among the tales of 
the purely human kind that Browning had been used 
to tell. Pheidippides belongs to the heroic line of 
How they brought the Good News and Herve Riel. 
The poetry of crisis, of the sudden, unforeseen, and 
irremediable critical moment, upon which so much of 
Browning's psychology converges, is carried to an 
unparalleled point of intensity in Clive and Martin 
Relph. And in most of these " idyls " there emerges 
a trait always implicit in Browning but only dis- 
tinctly apparent in this last decade — the ironical con- 
trasts between the hidden deeps of a man's soul and 
the assumptions or speculations of his neighbours 
about it. The two worlds — inner and outer — fall 
more sharply apart ; stranger abysses of self-con- 



THE LAST DECADE 221 

sciousness appear on the one side, more shallow and 
complacent illusions on the other. Relph's horror of 
remorse — painted with a few strokes of incomparable 
intensity, like his ' Get you behind the man I am 
now, you man that I used to be ! ' — is beyond the 
comprehension of the friendly peasants ; Clive's 
" fear " is as much misunderstood by his auditor as 
his courage by the soldiers j the " foolishness " of 
Muleykeh equally illudes his Arab comrades ; the 
Russian villagers, the Pope, and the lord have to 
fumble through a long process of argument to the 
conclusion which for Ivan had been the merest matter 
of fact from the first. Admirable in its quiet irony is 
the contrast between the stormy debate over his guilt 
or innocence and his serene security of mind as he 
sits cutting out a toy for his children : — 

" They told him he was free 
As air to walk abroad ; ' How otherwise ? ' asked he." 

With the " wild men " Halbert and Hob it is the 

spell of a sudden memory which makes an abrupt rift 

between the men they have seemed to be and the men 

they prove. Browning in his earlier days had gloried 

in these moments of disclosure ; now they served to 

emphasise the normal illusion. " Ah me ! " sounds 

the note of the proem to the second series, scornful 

and sad : — 

" Ah me ! 
So ignorant of man's whole, 
Of bodily organs plain to see — 
So sage and certain, frank and free, 
About what's under lock and key — 
Man's soul ! " 



222 BROWNING 

The volume called yocoseria (1883) contains some 
fine things, and abounds with Browning's invariable 
literary accomplishment and metrical virtuosity, but 
on the whole points to the gradual disintegration of 
his genius. " Wanting is — what ? " is the significant 
theme of the opening lyric, and most of the poetry 
has something which recalls the " summer redundant '* 
of leaf and flower not " breathed above " by vitalis- 
ing passion. Compared with the Men and Women 
or the Dramatis Personce^ the Jocoseria as a whole are 
indeed 

" Framework which waits for a picture to frame, . . . 
Roses embowering with nought they embower." 

Browning, the poet of the divining imagination, is less 
apparent here than the astute ironical observer who 
delights in pricking the bubbles of affectation, strip- 
ping ofF the masks of sham, and exhibiting human 
nature in unadorned nakedness. Donald is an ex- 
posure, savage and ugly, of savagery and ugliness in 
Sport ; Solomon and Balkis a reduction, dainty and gay, 
of these fabled paragons of wisdom to the dimensions 
of ordinary vain and amorous humanity. Lilith and 
Eve unmask themselves under stress of terror, as 
Balkis and Solomon at the compulsion of the magic 
ring, and Adam urbanely replaces the mask. Jochanan 
Hakkadosh, the saintly prop of Israel, expounds from 
his death-bed a gospel of struggle and endurance in 
which a troubled echo of the great strain of Ben Ezra 
may no doubt be heard ; but his career is, as a whole, 
a half-sad, half-humorous commentary on the vain- 



THE LAST DECADE 223 

ness of striving to extend the iron frontiers of mor- 
tality. Lover, poet, soldier, statist have each contrib- 
uted a part of their lives to prolong and enrich the 
saint's : but their fresh idealisms have withered vi^hen 
grafted upon his sober and sapless brain ; while his 
own garnered wisdom fares no better when committed 
to the crude enthusiasm of his disciples. But twice, 
in this volume, a richer and fuller music sounds. In 
the great poem of Ixion^ human illusions are still the 
preoccupying thought ; but they appear as fetters, not 
as specious masks, and instead of the serio-comic ex- 
posure of humanity we see its tragic and heroic de- 
liverance. Ixion is Browning's Prometheus. The 
song that breaks from his lips as he whirls upon the 
penal wheel of Zeus is a great liberating cry of de- 
fiance to the phantom-god — man's creature and his 
ape — who may plunge the body in torments but can 
never so baffle the soul but that 

« From the tears and sweat and blood of his torment 
Out of the wreck he rises past Zeus to the Potency o'er him, 
Pallid birth of my pain — where light, where light is, aspiring. 
Thither I rise, whilst thou — Zeus take thy godship and sink." 

And in Never the Time and the Place^ the pang of 
love's aching void and the rapture of reunion blend in 
one strain of haunting magical beauty, the song of an 
old man in whom one memory kindles eternal 
youth, a song in which, as in hardly another, the 
wistfulness of autumn blends with the plenitude of 
spring. 

Browning spent the summer months of 1883 at 



224 



BROWNING 



Gressoney St. Jean, a lonely spot high up in the Val 
d'Aosta, living, as usual when abroad, on the plainest 
of vegetable diet. " Delightful Gressoney ! " he 
wrote, 

" Who laughest, * ^ake what is, trust what may be ! * " 

And a mood of serene acquiescence in keeping with 
the scene breathes from the poem which occupied 
him during this pleasant summer. To Browning's 
old age, as to Goethe's, the calm wisdom and graceful 
symbolism of Persia offered a peculiar attraction. In 
the Westostlicher Divan^ seventy years earlier, Goethe, 
with a subtler sympathy, laid his finger upon the 
common germs of Eastern and Western thought and 
poetry. Browning, far less in actual touch with the 
Oriental mind, turned to the East in quest of pic- 
turesque habiliments for his very definitely European 
convictions — " Persian garments," which had to be 
" changed " in the mind of the interpreting reader. 

The Fancies have the virtues of good fables, — 
pithy wisdom, ingenious moral instances, homely 
illustrations, easy colloquial dialogue ; and the ethical 
teaching has a striking superficial likeness to the 
common-sense morality of prudence and content, 
which fables, like proverbs, habitually expound. 
" Cultivate your garden, don't trouble your head 
about insoluble riddles, accept your ignorance and 
your limitations, assume your good to be good and 
your evil to be evil, be a man and nothing more " — 
such is the recurring burden of Ferishtah's counsel. 
But such preaching on Browning's lips always carried 



THE LAST DECADE 225 

with it an implicit assumption that the preacher had 
himself somehow got outside the human limitations 
he insisted on j that he could measure the plausibility 
of man's metaphysics and theology, and distinguish 
between the anthropomorphism which is to be 
acquiesced in because we know no better, and that 
which is to be spurned because we know too much. 
Ferishtah's thought is a game of hide-and-seek, and 
its movements have all the dexterity of winding and 
subterfuge proper to success in that game. Against 
the vindictive God of the creeds he trusts his human 
assurance that pain is God's instrument to educate us 
into pity and love ; but when it is asked how a just 
God can single out sundry fellow-mortals 

" To undergo experience for our sake, 
Just that the gift of pain, bestowed on them, 
In us might temper to the due degree 
Joy's else-excessive largess," — 

instead of admitting a like appeal to the same human 
assurance, he falls back upon the unfathomable ways 
of Omnipotence. If the rifts in the argument are in 
any sense supplied, it is by the brief snatches of song 
which intervene between the Fancies^ as the cicada- 
note filled the pauses of the broken string. These 
exquisite lyrics are much more adequate expressions 
of Browning's faith than the dialogues which pro- 
fessedly embody it. They transfer the discussion 
from the jangle of the schools and the cavils of the 
market-place to the passionate persuasions of the 
heart and the intimate experiences of love, in which 



226 BROWNING 

all Browning's mysticism had its root. Thus 
Ferishtah's pragmatic, almost philistine, doctrine of 
" Plot-culture," by which human life is peremptorily 
walled in within its narrow round of tasks, " minute- 
ness severed from immensity,*' is followed by the 
lyric which tells how Love transcends those limits, 
making an eternity of time and a universe of solitude. 
Finally, the burden of these wayward intermittent 
strains of love-music is caught up, with an added 
intensity drawn from the poet's personal love and 
sorrow, in the noble Epilogue. As he listens to the 
call of Love, the world becomes an enchanted place, 
resounding with the triumph of good and the ex- 
ultant battle-joy of heroes. But a " chill wind " 
suddenly disencharms the enchantment, a doubt that 
buoyant faith might be a mirage conjured up by Love 
itself: — 

" What if all be error, 
If the halo irised round my head were — Love, thine arms ? ** 

He disdains to answer ; for the last words glow with 
a fire which of itself dispels the chill wind. A faith 
founded upon love had for Browning a surer 
guarantee than any founded upon reason ; it was 
secured by that which most nearly emancipated 
men from the illusions of mortality, and enabled 
them to see things as they are seen by God. 

The Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in 
their Day (1887) is a more laboured and, save for one 
or two splendid episodes, a less remarkable achieve- 
ment than Ferishtah. All the burly difFuseness which 



THE LAST DECADE 227 

had there been held in check by a quasi-oriental ideal 
of lightly-knit facility and bland oracular pithiness, 
here has its way without stint, and no more songs 
break like the rush of birds' wings upon the dusty air 
of colloquy. Thrusting in between the lyrics of 
Ferishtah and Asolando^ these Parleyings recall those 
other " people of importance " whose intrusive visit 
broke in upon " the tenderness of Dante." Neither 
their importance in their own day nor their relative 
obscurity, for the most part, in ours, had much to do 
with Browning's choice. They do not illustrate 
merely his normal interest in the obscure freaks and 
out-of-the-way anomalies of history. The doings of 
these " people " had once been " important " to 
Browning himself, and the old man's memory sum- 
moned up these forgotten old-world friends of his 
boyhood to be championed or rallied by their quondam 
disciple. The death of the dearest friend of his 
later life, J. Milsand, in 1886, probably set these 
chords vibrating ; the book is dedicated to his 
memory. Perhaps the Imaginary Conversations of an 
older friend and master of Browning's, one even 
more important in Browning's day and in ours than 
in his own, and the master of his youth, once more 
suggested the scheme. But these Parleyings are con- 
versations only in name. They are not even mono- 
logues of the old brilliantly dramatic kind. All the 
dramatic zest of converse is gone, the personages are 
the merest shadows, nothing is seen but the old poet 
haranguing his puppets or putting voluble expositions 
of his own cherished dogmas into their wooden lips. 



228 BROWNING 

We have glimpses of the boy, when not yet able to 
compass an octave, beating time to the simple but 
stirring old march of Avison " whilom of Newcastle 
organist " ; and before he has done, the memory 
masters him, and the pedestrian blank verse breaks 
into a hymn " rough, rude, robustious, homely heart 
athrob" to Pym the "man of men." Or he calls 
up Bernard Mandeville to confute the formidable 
pessimism of his old friend Carlyle — " whose groan I 
hear, with guffaw at the end disposing of mock- 
melancholy." Gerard de Lairesse, whose rococo 
landscapes had interested him as a boy, he introduces 
only to typify an outworn way of art — the mythic 
treatment of nature; but he illustrates this " inferior" 
way with a splendour of poetry that makes his ironic 
exposure dangerously like an unwitting vindication. 
These visions of Prometheus on the storm-swept crag, 
of Artemis hunting in the dawn, show that Browning 
was master, if he had cared to use it, of that magnif- 
icent symbolic speech elicited from Greek myth in 
the Hyperion or the Prometheus Unbound. But it was 
a foreign idiom to him, and his occasional use of it a 
tour de force. 

Two years only now remained for Browning, and it 
began to be apparent to his friends that his sturdy 
health was no longer secure. His way of life under- 
went no change, he was as active in society as ever, 
and acquaintances, old and new, still claimed his time, 
and added to the burden, always cheerfully endured, 
of his correspondence. In October, 1887, the marriage 
of his son attached him by a new tie to Italy, and the 



THE LAST DECADE 229 

Palazzo Rezzonico on the Grand Canal, where 
" Pen " and his young American wife presently settled, 
was to be his last, as it was his most magnificent, 
abode. To Venice he turned his steps each autumn 
of these last two years ; lingering by the way among 
the mountains or in the beautiful border region at their 
feet. It was thus that, in the early autumn of 1889, 
he came yet once again to Asolo. His old friend and 
hostess, Mrs. Arthur Bronson, had discovered a pleas- 
ant, airy abode on the old town-wall, overhanging a 
ravine, and Asolo, seen from this " castle precipice-en- 
curled," recovered all its old magic. It was here that 
he put together the disconnected pieces, many written 
during the last two years in London, others at Asolo 
itself, which were finally published on the day of his 
death. The Tower of Queen Cornaro still overlooked 
the little town, as it had done half a century before ; 
and he attached these last poems to the same tradition 
by giving them the pleasant title said to have been in- 
vented by her secretary. Asolando — Facts and Fan- 
cies^ both titles contain a hint of the ageing Browning, 
— the relaxed physical energy which allows this strenu- 
ous waker to dream (Reverie ; Bad Dreams) ; the flag- 
ging poetic power, whose fitful flashes could no longer 
transfigure the world for him, but only cast a fantastic 
flicker at moments across its prosaic features. The 
opening lines sadly confess the wane of the old vision : — 

" And now a flower is just a flower : 

Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man — 

Simply themselves, uncinct by dower 
Of dyes which, when life's day began, 

Round each in glory ran." 



230 



BROWNING 



The famous Epilogue is the last cheer of an old 
warrior in whom the stout fibre of heroism still held out 
when the finer nerve of vision decayed ; but A Reverie 
shows how heavy a strain it had to endure in sustain- 
ing his faith that the world is governed by Love. Of 
outward evidence for that conviction Browning saw 
less and less. But age had not dimmed his inner wit- 
ness, and those subtle filaments of mysterious affinity 
which, for Browning, bound the love of God for man 
to the love of man for woman, remained unimpaired. 
The old man of seventy-seven was still, in his last 
autumn, singing songs redolent, not of autumn, but of 
the perfume and the ecstasy of spring and youth, — 
love-lyrics so illusively youthful that one, not the least 
competent, of his critics has refused to accept them as 
work of his old age. Yet Now and Summum Bonum^ 
and J Pearly a Girl^ with all their apparent freshness 
and spontaneity, are less like rapt utterances of passion 
than eloquent analyses of it by one who has known it 
and who still vibrates with the memory. What pre- 
occupies and absorbs him is not the woman, but the 
wonder of the transfiguration wrought for him by her 
word or kiss, — the moment, made eternal, the " blaze *' 
in which he became " lord of heaven and earth." But 
some of the greatest love-poetry of the world — from 
Dante onwards — has reflected an intellect similarly 
absorbed in articulating a marvellous experience. For 
the rest, Asolando is a miscellany of old and new, — 
bright loose drift from the chance moods of genius, or 
bits of anecdotic lumber carefully recovered and refur- 
bished, as in prescience of the nearing end. 



THE LAST DECADE 23! 

Yet no such prescience appears to have been his. 
His buoyant confidence in his own vitality held its 
own. He was full of schemes of work. At the end 
of October the idyllic days at Asolo ended, and 
Browning repaired for the last time to the Palazzo 
Rezzonico. A month later he caught a bronchial 
catarrh ; failure of the heart set in, and on the even- 
ing of December 12 he peacefully died. On the 
last day of the year his body was laid to rest in " Poets* 
Corner." 



PART II 
BROWNING'S MIND AND ART 



CHAPTER IX 

THE POET 

Then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss — 
Another Boehme with a tougher book 
And subtler meanings of what roses say, — 
Or some stout Mage, like him of Halberstadt, 
John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about ? 
He with a " look you ! " vents a brace of rhymes. 
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, 
* » * * * 

Buries us with a glory, young once more, 

Pouring heaven into this shut house of life. 

— Transcendentalism. 

I 

" I HAVE, you are to know," Browning once wrote to 
Miss Haworth, "such a love for flowers and leaves 
. . . that I every now and then in an impatience at 
being unable to possess them thoroughly, to see them 
quite, satiate myself with their scent, — bite them to 
bits." " All poetry," he wrote some twenty years 
later to Ruskin, " is the problem of putting the infi- 
nite into the finite." Utterances like these, not con- 
veyed through the lips of some " dramatic " creation, 
but written seriously in his own person to intimate 
friends, give us a clue more valuable it may be than 
some other utterances which are oftener quoted and 
better known, to the germinal impulses of Brown- 
ing's poetic work. " Finite " and " infinite " were 

235 



236 BROWNING 

words continually on his lips, and it is clear that both 
sides of the antithesis represented instincts rooted in 
his mental nature, drawing nourishment from distinct 
but equally fundamental springs of feeling and thought. 
Each had its stronghold in a particular psychical re- 
gion. The province and feeding-ground of his pas- 
sion for " infinity *' was that eager and restless self- 
consciousness which he so vividly described in Paul- 
ine^ seeking to " be all, have, see, know, taste, feel 
all," to become all natures, like Sordello, yet retain the 
law of his own being. '' I pluck the rose and love it 
more than tongue can speak," says the lover in Two 
in the Campagna. Browning had his full portion of 
the romantic idealism which, under the twofold stimu- 
lus of literary and political revolution, had animated 
the poetry of the previous generation. But while he 
clearly shared the uplifted aspiring spirit of Shelley, it 
assumed in him a totally different character. Shelley 
abhors limits, everything grows evanescent and aethereal 
before his solvent imagination, the infinity he aspires 
after unveils itself at his bidding, impalpable, unde- 
fined, " intense," " inane." Whereas Browning's 
restlessly aspiring temperament worked under the con- 
trol of an eye and ear that fastened with peculiar em- 
phasis and eagerness upon all the limits, the disso- 
nances, the angularities that Shelley's harmonising 
fancy dissolved away. The ultimate psychological 
result was that the brilliant clarity and precision of his 
imagined forms gathered richness and intensity of sug- 
gestion from the vaguer impulses of temperament, 
and that an association was set up between them which 



THE POET 237 

makes it literally true to say that, for Browning, the 
" finite " is not the rival or the antithesis, but the very 
language of the " infinite," — that the vastest and most 
transcendent realities have for him their points d' appui 
in some bit of intense life, some darting bird or insect, 
some glow^ing flovt^er or leaf. Existence ebbs away 
from the large, featureless, monotonous things, to 
concentrate itself in a spiked cypress or a jagged 
mountain cleft. A placid soul without " incidents '* 
arrests him less surely than the fireflies on a mossy 
bank. Hence, while " the finite " always appears, 
when explicitly contrasted with " the infinite," as the 
inferior, — as something soi-disant imperfect and in- 
complete, — its actual status and function in Brown- 
ing's imaginative world rather resembles that of Plato's 
TT^/oa? in relation to the aTreipov, — the saving "limit" 
which gives definite existence to the limitless vague. 



II 

Hence Browning, while a romantic in temper, was, 
in comparison with his predecessors, a thorough realist 
in method. All the Romantic poets of the previous 
generation had refused and decried some large portion 
of reality. Wordsworth had averted his ken from 
half of human fate ; Keats and Shelley turned from 
the forlornness of human society as it was to the 
transfigured humanity of myth. All three were out 
of sympathy with civilisation ; and their revolt went 
much deeper than a distaste for the types of men it 
bred. They attacked a triumphant age of reason in 



238 BROWNING 

its central fastness, the brilliant analytic intelligence 
to which its triumphs were apparently due. Keats 
declaimed at cold philosophy which undid the rain- 
bow's spells 5 Shelley repelled the claim of mere un- 
derstanding to settle the merits of poetry ; Words- 
worth, the profoundest, though by no means the most 
cogent or connected, thinker of the three, denounced 
the " meddling intellect '* which murders to dissect, 
and strove to strip language itself of every element 
of logic and fancy, as distortions of the truth, only to 
be uttered in the barest words, which comes to the 
heart that watches and receives. On all these issues 
Browning stands in sharp, if not quite absolute, con- 
trast. " Barbarian," as he has been called, and as in 
a quite intelligible sense he was, he found his poetry 
pre-eminently among the pursuits, the passions, the 
interests and problems, of civilised men. His potent 
gift of imagination never tempted him, during his 
creative years, to assail the sufficiency of intellect, or 
to disparage the intellectual and " artificial " elements 
of speech ; on the contrary, he appears from the out- 
set employing in the service of poetry a discursive 
logic of unsurpassed swiftness and dexterity, and a 
vast heterogeneous army of words gathered, like a 
sudden levy, with a sole eye to their effective force, 
from every corner of civilised life, and wearing the 
motley of the most prosaic occupations. It was only 
in the closing years that he began to distrust the power 
of thought to get a grip upon reality. His delight in 
poetic argument is often doubtless that of the ironical 
casuist, looking on at the self-deceptions of a soul ; 



THE POET 239 

but his interest in ideas was a rooted passion that gave 
a thoroughly new, and to many readers most unwel- 
come, " intellectuality " to the whole manner as well 
as substance of his poetic work. 

While Browning thus, in Nietzsche's phrase, said 
"Yes" to many sides of existence which his Ro- 
mantic predecessors repudiated or ignored, he had 
some very definite limitations of his own. He gath- 
ered into his verse crowded regions of experience 
which they neglected ; but some very glorious ave- 
nues of poetry pursued by them he refused to explore. 
Himself the most ardent believer in the supernatural 
among all the great poets of his time, the supernatural, 
as such, has hardly any explicit place in his poetry. 
To the eternal beauty of myth and folk-lore, — dream- 
palaces " never built at all and therefore built for- 
ever," — all that province of the poetical realm which 
in the memorable partition of 1797 Coleridge had 
taken for his own, splendidly emulated by Shelley and 
by Keats, Browning the Platonist maintained on the 
whole the attitude of the utilitarian man of facts. 
" Fairy-poetry," he agreed with Elizabeth Barrett in 
1845-46, was "impossible in the days of steam." 
With a faith in a transcendent divine world as assured 
as Dante's or Milton's, he did not aspire to " pass the 
flaming bounds of Space or Time," or " to possess the 
sun and stars." No reader of Gerard de La'iresse at 
one end of his career, or of the vision of Paracelsus 
at the other, or Childe Roland in the middle, can mis- 
take the capacity ; but habit is more trustworthy than 
an occasional tour de force ; and Browning's imagina- 



240 BROWNING 

tion worked freely only when it bodied forth a life in 
accord with the waking experience of his own day. 
" A poet never dreams," said his philosophical Don 
Juan, " we prose folk always do " ; and the epigram 
brilliantly announced the character of Browning's 
poetic world, — the world of prose illuminated through 
and through in every cranny and crevice by the keen- 
est and most adventurous of exploring intellects. 

In physical organisation Browning's endowment 
was decidedly of the kind which prompts men to 
" accept the universe " with joyful alacrity. Like his 
contemporary Victor Hugo, he was, after all reserves 
have been made, from first to last one of the healthiest 
and heartiest of men. If he lacked the burly stature 
and bovine appetite with which young Hugo a little 
scandalised the delicate sensibilities of French Ro- 
manticism, he certainly " came eating and drinking," 
and amply equipped with nerve and muscle, activity, 
accomplishment, social instinct, and savoir faire. 
The isolating loneliness of genius was checkmated 
by a profusion of the talents which put men en rap- 
port with their kind. The reader of his biography is 
apt to miss in it the signs of that heroic or idealist 
detachment which he was never weary of extolling in 
his verse. He is the poet par excellence of the glory of 
failure and dissatisfaction ; but this life was, in the 
main, that of one who succeeded and who was satis- 
fied with his success. In the vast bulk of his writings 
we look in vain for the " broken arc," the " half-told 
tale," and it is characteristic that he never revised. 
Even after the great sorrow of his life, the mood of 



THE POET 241 

Prospice^ though it may have underlain all his other 
moods, did not suppress or transform them ; he 
" lived in the world and loved earth's way," and how- 
ever assured that this earth is not his only sphere, did 
not wish 

" the wings unfurled 
That sleep in the worm, they say." 

Whatever affinities Browning may have with the 
mystic or the symbolist for whom the whole sense- 
world is but the sign of spiritual realities, it is plain 
that this way of envisaging existence found little sup- 
port in the character of his senses. He had not the 
brooding eye, beneath which, as it gazes, loveliness 
becomes far lovelier, but an organ aggressively alert, 
minutely inquisitive, circumstantially exact, which 
perceived the bearings of things, and explored their 
intricacies, noted how the mortar was tempered in the 
walls and if any struck a woman or beat a horse, but 
was as little prone to transfigure these or other things 
with the glamour of mysterious suggestion as the eye 
of Peter Bell himself. He lacked the stranger and 
subtler sensibilities of eye and ear, to which Nature 
poetry of the nineteenth century owes so much. His 
senses were efficient servants to an active brain, not 
magicians flinging dazzling spells into the air before 
him or mysterious music across his path. By a curi- 
ous and not unimportant peculiarity he could see a 
remote horizon clearly with one eye, and read the 
finest print in twilight with the other ; but he could 
not, like Wordsworth, hear the " sound of alien mel- 



242 BROWNING 

ancholy " given out from the mountains before a 
storm. The implicit realism of his eye and ear was 
fortified by acute tactual and muscular sensibilities. 
He makes us vividly aware of surface and texture, of 
space, solidity, shape. Matter with him is not the 
translucent, tenuous, half-spiritual substance of Shel- 
ley, but aggressively massive and opaque, tense with 
solidity. And he had in an eminent degree the quick 
and eager apprehension of space-relations which usu- 
ally goes with these developed sensibilities of eye and 
muscle. There is a hint of it in an early anecdote. 
" Why, sir, you are quite a geographer ! *' he reported 
his mother to have said to him when, on his very first 
walk with her, he had given her an elaborate imaginary 
account of " his houses and estates.'* ^ But it was 
only late in life that this acute plasticity and concrete- 
ness of his sensibility found its natural outlet. When 
in their last winter at Rome (1860-61) he took to 
clay-modelling, it was with an exultant rapture which 
for the time thrust poetry into the shade. "The 
more tired he has been, and the more his back ached, 
poor fellow," writes his wife, " the more he has ex- 
ulted and been happy — no, nothing ever made him so 
happy before."^ This was the immense joy of one 
who has at length found the key after half a lifetime 
of trying at the lock. 

* Mrs. Orr, Life, p. 24. 

8 Mrs. Browning's Letters^ March, 1861. 



THE POET 



243 



III 

And yet realism as commonly understood is a mis- 
leading term for Browning's art. If his keen objec- 
tive senses penned his imagination, save for a fevi^ 
daring escapades, within the limits of a somewhat 
normal actuality, it exercised, within those limits, a 
superb individuality of choice. The acute observer 
was doubled with a poet whose vehement and fiery 
energy and intense self-consciousness influenced what 
he observed, and yet far more what he imagined and 
what he expressed. It is possible to distinguish four 
main lines along which this determining bias told. 
He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing 
colour, of dazzling light ; in the more complex motory- 
stimulus of intricate, abrupt, and plastic form, — feasts 
for the agile eye ; in all the signs of power, exciting 
a kindred joy by sympathy ; and in all the signs of 
conscious life or " soul," exciting a joy which only 
reaches its height when it is enforced by those more 
elemental and primitive springs of joy, when he is 
engaged with souls that glow like a flower or a gem, 
with souls picturesquely complex and diversified, or 
vehement, aspiring, heroic. In each of those four 
domains, light and colour, form, power, soul. Brown- 
ing had a profound, and in the fullest sense creative, 
joy, which in endless varieties and combinations 
dominated his imagination, controlled and pointed its 
flight, and determined the contents, the manner, and 
the atmosphere of his poetic work. To trace these 
operations in detail will be the occupation of the five 
following sections. 



244 BROWNING 

IV 

I. Joy in Light and Colour 

Browning's repute as a thinker and " teacher " long 
overshadowed his glory as a singer, and it still to some 
extent impedes the recognition of his bold and splen- 
did colouring. It is true that he is never a colourist 
pure and simple; his joy in light and colour is never 
merely epicurean. Poets so great as Keats often seem 
to sit as luxurious guests at their own feasts of sense ; 
Browning has rather the air of a magnificent dispenser, 
who " provides and not partakes." His colouring is 
not subtle ; it recalls neither the asthereal opal of 
Shelley nor the dewy flushing glow and " verdurous 
glooms " of Keats, nor the choice and cultured splen- 
dour of Tennyson ; it is bold, simple, and intense. 
He neglects the indecisive and subdued tones ; the 
mingled hues chiefly found in Nature, or the tender 
" silvery-grey " of Andrea's placid perfection. He 
dazzles us with scarlet and crimson ; with rubies, and 
blood, and " the poppy's red effrontery," with topaz, 
and amethyst, and the glory of gold, makes the sense 
ache with the lustre of blue, and heightens the effect 
of all by the boldest contrast. Who can doubt that 
he fell the more readily upon one of his quaintest 
titles because of the priestly ordinance that the 
" Pomegranates " were to be " of blue and of purple 
and of scarlet," and the " Bells " " of gold " ? He 
loves the daybreak hour of the world's awakening 
vitality as poets of another temper love the twilight ; 
the splendour of sunrise pouring into the chamber of 



THE POET 245 

Pippa, and steeping Florence in that " live translucent 
bath of air " j ^ he loves the blaze of the Italian mid- 
day — 

" Great noontides, thunder-storms, all glaring pomps 
That triumph at the heels of June the god." 

Even a violet-bed he sees as a " flash " of " blue." 2 
He loves the play of light on golden hair, and rarely 
imagines womanhood vi^ithout it, even in the sombre 
South and the dusky East ; Porphyria and Lady Car- 
lisle, Evelyn Hope and the maid of Pornic, share the 
gift u^ith Anael the Druse, with Sordello's Palma, 
whose 

" tresses curled 
Into a sumptuous swell of gold, and wound 
About her like a glory ! even the ground 
Was bright as with spilt sunbeams ; " 

and the girl in Love among the Ruins^ and the " dear 
dead women '* of Venice. His love of fire and of the 
imagery of flame has one of its sources in his love of 
light. Verona emerges from the gloom of the past as 
" a darkness kindling at the core." He sees the 
" pink perfection of the cyclamen,'* the " rose bloom 
o'er the summit's front of stone." And, like most 
painters of the glow of light, he throws a peculiar in- 
tensity into his glooms. When he paints a dark night, 
as in Pan and Luna^ the blackness is a solid jelly-like 

1 " I never grow tired of sunrises," he wrote in a letter, recently 
published, to Aubrey de Vere, in 1851 (^A. de Vere : A Memoir, by 
Wilfrid Ward). 

^ Two Poets of Croisic. 



246 BROWNING 

thing that can be cut. And even night itself falls 
short of the pitchy gloom that precedes the Eastern 
vision, breaking in despair " against the soul of black- 
ness there," as the gloom of Saul's tent discovers 
within it " a something more black than the blackness," 
the sustaining tent-pole, and then Saul himself " gi- 
gantic and blackest of all." 

But mostly the foil is a vivid, even strident, con- 
trast. He sees the " old June weather " blue above, 
and the 

" great opaque 
Blue breadth of sea without a break " 

under the walls of the seaside palazzo in Southern 
Italy, " where the baked cicala dies of drouth " ; and 
the blue lilies about the harp of golden-haired David ; 
and Solomon gold-robed in the blue abyss of his cedar 
house, " like the centre spike of gold which burns 
deep in the blue-bell's womb " ; ^ and the " gaze of 
Apollo" through the gloom of Verona woods ;^ he 
sees the American pampas — " miles and miles of gold 
and green," " where the sunflowers blow in a solid 
glow," with a horse — " coal-black " — careering across 
it; and his swarthy Ethiop uses the yellow poison- 
wattles of a lizard to divine with.^ If he imagines 
the " hairy-gold orbs " of the sorb-fruit, they must be 
ensconced in " black glossy myrtle-berries," foils in 
texture as in hue ; ^ and he neglects the mellow har- 
monies of autumnal decay in order to paint the leaf 
which is like a splash of blood intense, abrupt, across 
* Popularity. ' Sordello. 3 15 4 Englishman in Italy. 



THE POET 



247 



the flame of a golden shield.^ He makes the most of 
every hint of contrast he finds, and delights in images 
which accentuate the rigour of antithesis ; Cleon's 
mingled black and white slaves remind him of a tesse- 
lated pavement, and Blougram's fluctuating faith and 
doubt of a chess-board. And when, long after the 
tragic break-up of his Italian home, he reverted in 
thought to Miss Blagden's Florentine garden, the one 
impression that sifted itself out in his tell-tale memory 
was of spots of colour and light upon dark back- 
grounds, — " the herbs in red flower, and the butterflies 
on the tgp of the wall under the olive-trees." ^ 

Browning's colouring is thus strikingly expressive 
of the build of his mind, as sketched above. It is the 
colouring of a realist in so far as it is always caught 
from life, and never fantastic or mythical. But it is 
chosen with an instinctive and peremptory bias of eye 
and imagination — the index of a mind impatient of 
indistinct confusions and placid harmony, avid of in- 
tensity, decision, and conflict. 



2. Joy in Form 

If the popular legend of Browning ignores his pas- 
sion for colour, it altogether scouts the suggestion that 
he had a peculiar delight in form. By general con- 
sent he lacked the most ordinary and decent attention 
to it. No doubt he is partly responsible for this im- 

' By the Fireside. 

* Mrs. Orr, Life^ p. 258. 



248 BROWNING 

pression himself. His ideals of literary form were 
not altogether those commonly recognised in liter- 
ature. If we understand by form the quality of clear- 
cut outline and sharply defined articulation, there is a 
sense in which it was one of the most ingrained in- 
stincts of his nature, indulged at times with even mor- 
bid excess. Alike in life and in art he hated sloth, — 
the slovenliness of the " ungirt loin " and of the in- 
decisive touch. In conduct, this animus expressed 
itself in a kind of punctilious propriety. The forms 
of social convention Browning observed not merely 
with the scrupulous respect of the man of fashion, 
but with the enthusiasm of the virtuoso. Near akin 
in genius to the high priests of the Romantic temple, 
Browning rarely, even in the defiant heyday of ado- 
lescence, set more than a tentative foot across the 
outer precincts of the Romantic Bohemia. His " in- 
dividualism " was not of the type which overflows in 
easy affectations ; he was too original to be eccentric, 
too profoundly a man of letters to look " like a 
damned literary man." In his poetry this animus 
took a less equivocal shape. Not a little, both of its 
vividness and of its obscurity, flows from the undis- 
ciplined exuberance of his joy in form. An acute 
criticism of Mrs. Browning's — in some points the 
very best critic he ever had — puts one aspect of this 
admirably. The Athenceum had called him '"• misty." 
" Misty," she retorts, " is an infamous word for your 
kind of obscurity. You never are misty, not even in 
Sordello — never vague. Your graver cuts deep sharp 
lines, always, — and there is an extra distinctness in 



THE POET 



249 



your images and thoughts, from the midst of which, 
crossing each other infinitely, the general significance 
seems to escape." ^ That is the overplus of form 
producing obscurity. But through immense tracts of 
Browning the effect of the extra-distinctness of his 
images and thoughts, of the deep sharp lines cut by 
his graver, is not thus frustrated, but tells to the full 
in amazingly vivid and unforgettable expression. Yet 
he is no more a realist of the ordinary type here than 
in his colouring. His deep sharp lines are caught 
from life, but under the control of a no less definite 
bias of eye and brain. Sheer nervous and muscular 
energy had its part here also. As he loved the intense 
colours which most vigorously stimulate the optic 
nerve, so he delighted in the angular, indented, inter- 
twining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface 
which call for the most delicate, and at the same time 
the most agile, adjustments of the muscles of the eye. 
He caught at the edges of things — the white line of 
foam against the shore, the lip of the shell, and he 
could compare whiteness as no other poet ever did to 
" the bitten lip of hate." He once saw with delight 
" a solitary bee nipping a leaf round till it exactly 
fitted the front of a hole."^ Browning's joy in form 
was as little epicurean as his joy in colour; it was a 
banquet of the senses in which the sense of motion 
and energy had the largest part. Smooth, flowing, 
rounded, undulating outlines, which the eye glides 
along without check, are insipid and profitless to him, 
and he " welcomes the rebuff" of every jagged ex- 
^ E. B. to R. R., Jan. 19, 1846. 2 To E. B. B., Jan. 5, 1846. 



250 



BROWNING 



crescence or ragged fray, of every sudden and abrupt 
breach of continuity. His eye seizes the crisp inden- 
tations of ferns as they " fit their teeth to the polished 
block" of a grey boulder-stone;^ seizes the '' sharp- 
curled " olive-leaves as they " print the blue sky " 
above the morning glories of Florence;^ seizes the 
sharp zigzag of lightning against the Italian midnight, 
the fiery west through a dungeon grating or a lurid 
rift in the clouds,^ — " one gloom, a rift of fire, another 
gloom," — the brilliant line of Venice suspended " be- 
tween blue and blue." " Cup-mosses and ferns and 
spotty yellow leaves — all that I love heartily," he 
wrote to E. B. B. ^ Roses and moss strike most 
men's senses by a soft luxuriance in which all sharp 
articulation of parts is merged; but what Browning 
seizes on in the rose is its " labyrinthine " intricacy, 
while the moss becomes a little forest of " fairy-cups 
and elf needles." And who else would have thought 
of saying that " the fields look rough with hoary 
dew " ? ^ In the Easter-Day vision he sees the sky as 
a network of black serrated ridges. He loves the 
intricate play of light and shade, and the irregular, 
contorted, honeycombed surface which produces it; 
craggy, scarred, indented mountains, " like an old 
lion's cheek-teeth " ; ^ old towns with huddled roofs 

I By the Fireside. ' Old Pictures in Florence. 

^Sordello, i. l8i. 

4 Jan. 5, 1846, apropos of a poem by Home. The " love " may 
refer to Home's description of these things, but it matters little for 
the present purpose. 

^ Home T/iotights. 

6 Karshiskf i. 515. Cf. Englishman in Italy ^ i. 397. 



THE POET 251 

and towers picked out " black and crooked," like 
" fretwork," or " Turkish verse along a scimitar " ; 
old walls, creviced and crannied, intertwined with 
creepers, and tenanted by crossing swarms of ever- 
busy flies, — such things are the familiar commonplace 
of Browning's sculpturesque fancy. His metrical 
movements are full of the same joy in " fretwork " 
effects — verse-rhythm and sense-rhythm constantly 
crossing where the reader expects them to coincide.^ 

Nor was his imaginative sculpture confined to low- 
relief. Every rift in the surface catches his eye, and 
the deeper and more intricate the recess, the more 
curiously his insinuating fancy explores it. Sordello's 
palace is " a maze of corridors," — " dusk winding 
stairs, dim galleries." He probes the depths of the 
flower-bell ; he pries after the warmth and scent that 
lie within the "■ loaded curls " of his lady, and 
irradiates the lizard, or the gnome,^ in its rock- 
chamber, the bee in its amber drop,^ or in its 
bud,^ the worm in its clod. When Keats describes 
the closed eyes of the sleeping Madeline he is con- 
tent with the loveliness he sees : — 

"And still she slept an azure- lidded sitt^^." 

Browning's mining fancy insists on showing us the 

^ Cf., e. g., his treatment of the six-line stanza. 

2 Sordello. 

3 This turn of fancy was one of his points of affinity with 
Uonne ; cf. R. B. to E. B. B., i. 46 : " Music should enwrap the 
thought, as Donne says an amber drop enwraps a bee.* 

^ Porphyria. 



252 BROWNING 

eye of the dead Porphyria " ensconced " within its 
eyelid, " like a bee in a bud." A cleft is as seductive 
to his imagination as a cave to Shelley's. In a cleft 
of the wind-gashed Apennines he imagines the home 
he would best love in all the world ; Mn a cleft the 
pine-tree, symbol of hardy song,^ strikes precarious 
root, the ruined eagle finds refuge,^ and Sibrandus 
Schaffnaburgensis a watery Inferno. A like instinct 
allures him to other images of deep hollow things the 
recesses of which something else explores and oc- 
cupies, — the image of the sheath ; the image of the 
cup. But he is equally allured by the opposite, or 
salient, kind of angularity. Beside the Calabrian 
seaside house stands a " sharp tree — a cypress — 
rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit o'er-crusted," — in all 
points a thoroughly Browningesque tree. 

And so, corresponding to the cleft-like array of 
sheaths and cups, a not less prolific family of spikes 
and luedges and swords runs riot in Browning's work. 
The rushing of a fresh river-stream into the warm 
ocean tides crystallises into the " crystal spike be- 
tween two warm walls of wave ; " ^ " air thickens," 
and the wind, grown solid, " edges its wedge in and 
in as far as the point would go."^'' The fleecy clouds 
embracing the flying form of Luna clasp her as close 
" as dented spine fitting its flesh." ^ The fiery agony 
of John the heretic is a plucking of sharp spikes from 

^ Dibits Gttste. ' Patj and Luna. 

3 E. g., Balausti(m*s Advtnture ; Proem. 
•* Caliban on Setebos. ^ A Lover'' s Quarrel. 

s Pan and Luna. 



THE POET 253 

his rose.^ Lightning is a bright sword, plunged 
through the pine-tree roof. And Mont Blanc him- 
self is half effaced by his "earth-brood" of aiguilles, 
— " needles red and white and green, Horns of 
silver, fangs of crystal, set on edge in his demesne." ^ 
Browning's joy in abrupt and intricate form had 
then a definite root in his own nervous and muscular 
energy. It was no mere preference which might be 
indulged or not, but an instinctive bias, which deeply 
affected his way not only of imagining but of con- 
ceiving the relations of things. In this brilliant 
visual speech of sharply cut angles and saliences, of 
rugged incrustations, and labyrinthine multiplicity. 
Browning's romantic hunger for the infinite had to 
find its expression ; and it is clear that the bias im- 
plicit in speech imposed itself in some points upon 
the matter it conveyed. Abrupt demarcations cut 
off soul from body, and man from God ; the infinite 
habitually presented itself to him as something, not 
transcending and comprehending the finite, but begin- 
ning where the finite stopped^ — Eternity at the end of 
Time. But the same imaginative passion for form 
which imposed some concrete limitations upon the 
Absolute deprived it also of the vagueness of abstrac- 
tion. Browning's divinity is very finite, but also 
amazingly real and near ; not " interfused " with 
the world, which is full of stubborn distinctness, 
but permeating it through and through, " curled 
inextricably round about " all its beauty and its 
power,^ "intertwined" with earth's lowliest exist- 
* The Heretic'' s Tragedy. ^ ^^ Saisiaz. ^ Easter-Day ^ xxx. 



254 BROWNING 

ence, and thrilling with answering rapture to every 
throb of life. The doctrine of God's '^ immanence " 
was almost a commonplace with Browning's genera- 
tion. Browning turned the doctrine into imaginative 
speech equalled in impressiveness by that of Carlyle 
and by that of Emerson, but distinguished from both 
by an eager articulating concrete sensibility which 
lifts into touch with supreme Good all the laby- 
rinthine multiplicity of existence which Carlyle im- 
patiently suppressed, while it joyously accentuates 
the sharp dissonances which Emerson's ideality 
ignored. 



VI 

3. Joy in Power 

Browning was thus announced, we have seen, even 
by his splendour of colouring and his rich and clear- 
cut plasticity, as something more than a feaster upon 
colour and form. In his riot of the senses there 
was more of the athlete than of the voluptuary. His 
joy was that of one to whom nervous and muscular 
tension was itself a stimulating delight. In such a 
temperament the feeling of energy was an elemen- 
tary instinct, a passionate obsession, which projected 
itself through eye and ear and imagination into the 
outer world, filling it with the throbbing pulsations 
or the clashing conflict of vehement powers. We 
know that it was thus with Browning. " From the 
first Power was, I knew," he wrote in the last 



THE POET 255 

autumn of his life.' It was a primitive instinct, and 
it remained firmly rooted to the last. As Words- 
worth saw Joy everywhere, and Shelley Love, so 
Browning saw Power. If he later " saw Love as 
plainly," it was the creative and transforming, not the 
emotional, aspect of Love which caught his eye. 
His sense of Power played a yet more various part in 
the shaping of his poetic world than did his sense of 
form. But intellectual growth inevitably modified the 
primitive instinct which it could not uproot ; and his 
sense of Power traverses the whole gamut of dynamic 
tones, from the lusty " barbaric '* joy in the sheer 
violence of ripping and clashing, to the high-wrought 
sensibility which throbs in sympathy with the passion- 
ate heart-beats of the stars. 

No one can miss the element of savage energy in 
Browning. His associates tell us of his sudden fits 
of indignation, " which were like thunder-storms *' ; 
of his " brutal scorn " for effeminacy, of the " vibra- 
tion of his loud voice, and his hard fist upon the ta- 
ble,'* which made short work of cobwebs.^ The im- 
pact of hard resisting things, the jostlings of stubborn 
matter bent on going its own way, attracted him as 
the subtle compliances of air appealed to Shelley ; and 
he runs riot in the vocabulary (so abundantly devel- 
oped in English) which conveys with monosyllabic 
vigour to the ear these jostlings and impacts. 

" Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage; 
Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank 
Soil to a plash ? " 

> Asolando : Reverie. 9 Mr. E. Gosse, in Diet, of N.B, 



256 BROWNING 

he asks in Ch'ilde Roland^ — altogether an instructive 
example of the ways of Browning's imagination when 
working, as it so rarely did, on a deliberately fantastic 
theme. Hear again with what savage joy his Moon 
"rips the womb" of the cloud that crosses it; Shel- 
ley's Moon, in keeping with the ways of his more 
tender-hefted universe, merely broke its woof. So the 
gentle wife of James Lee sees in a vineyard " the 
vines writhe in rows each impaled on its stake." 

His " clefts " and " wedges " owe their attraction 
not only to their intricate angularity but to the violent 
cleavings and thrustings apart which they result from 
or produce. And his clefts are as incomplete without 
some wild bit of fierce or frightened life in their grip 
as are Shelley's caves without some form of unearthly 
maidenhood in their embrace.^ His mountains — so 
rarely the benign pastoral presences of Wordsworth — 
are not only craggy and rough, but invisible axes have 
hewn and mutilated them, — they are fissured and 
cloven and " scalped " and " wind-gashed." When 
they thrust their mighty feet into the plain and " en- 
twine base with base to knit strength more intensely," ^ 
the image owes its grandeur to the double suggestion 
of sinewy power and intertwined limbs. Still grander, 
but in the same style, is the sketch of Hildebrand in 
Sordello ; — 



" See him stand 
Buttressed upon his mattock, Hildebrand 
Of the huge brain-mask welded ply o'er ply 

* Cf. Prometheus Unbound, passim. ^ Saul. 



THE POET 257 

As in a forge ; . . . teeth clenched, 

The neck tight-corded too, the chin deep-trenched, 

As if a cloud enveloped him while fought 

Under its shade, grim prizers, thought with thought 

At deadlock." 1 

When the hoary cripple in Childe Roland la-ughs^ 
his mouth-edge is " pursed and scored " with his glee ; 
and his scorn must not merely be uttered, but written 
with his crutch " in the dusty thoroughfare." This 
idea Is resumed yet more dramatically in the image of 
the palsied oak, cleft like " a distorted mouth that splits 
its rim gaping at death." Later on, thrusting his 
spear into the gloom, he fancies it " tangled in a dead 
man's hair or beard." Similarly, Browning is habit- 
ually lured into expressive detail by the idea of 
smooth surfaces frayed or shredded, — as of flesh torn 
with teeth or spikes : Akiba, — 

" the comb 
Of iron carded, flesh from bone, away," ' 

or Hippolytus, ruined on the " detested beach " that 
was "bright with blood and morsels of his flesh." ^ 

This savageness found vent still more freely in his 
rendering of sounds. By one of those apparent par- 
adoxes which abound in Browning, the poet who has 
best interpreted the glories of music in verse, the poet 
of musicians par excellence^ is also the poet of grind- 
ings and jostlings, of jars and clashes, of grating hinges 
and flapping doors ; civilisation mated with barbarism, 
" like Jove in a thatched house." 

» Sordello, i. 171. 2 joch. Halk. ^Artemis Prol. 



258 BROWNING 

Music appealed to him by its imaginative sugges- 
tiveness, or by its intricate technique ; as the mine 
from which Abt Vogler reared his palace, the loom on 
which Master Hugues wove the intertwining har- 
monies of his fugue. But the most dulcet harmony 
aroused him less surely to vivacious expression than 
some "gruff hinge's invariable scold," ^ or the quick 
sharp rattle of rings down the net-poles,^ or the hoof- 
beat of a galloping horse, or the grotesque tumble of 
the old organist, in fancy, down the " rotten-runged, 
rat-riddled stairs" of his lightless loft. There was 
much in him of his own Hamelin rats* alacrity of 
response to sounds " as of scraping tripe " and squeez- 
ing apples, and the rest. Milton contrasted the har- 
monious swing of the gates of Paradise with the harsh 
grinding of the gates of hell. Browning would have 
found in the latter a satisfaction subtly allied to his 
zest for other forms of robust malignity. 

And with his joy in savage images went an even 
more pronounced joy in savage words. He loved the 
grinding, clashing, and rending sibilants and explo- 
sives as Tennyson the tender-hefted liquids. Both 
poets found their good among Saxon monosyllables, 
but to Tennyson they appealed by limpid simplicity, 
to Browning by gnarled and rugged force. Dante, in 
a famous chapter of the De Vulgari Eloquio^ laid down 
a fourfold distinction among words on the analogy of 
the varying texture of the hair; enjoining the poet to 
avoid both the extremes of smoothness and roughness, 

^ Christmas Eve, i. 480. 2 Englishman in Italy, i. 396. 

3 De Vulg, Eloq., ii. 8. 



THE POET 



259 



— to prefer the " combed " and the " shaggy " to the 
"tousled" and the "sleek." All four kinds had 
their function in the versatile technique of Browning 
and Tennyson ; but it is safe to say that while Ten- 
nyson's vocabulary is focussed among the " combed " 
in the direction of the " sleek," Browning's centres in 
the " shaggy," verging towards the " tousled." ^ The 
utmost sweetness is his when he will ; it is the coun- 
terpart of his pure intensity of colouring, and of the 
lyric loveliness of his Pippas and Pompilias ; but 

** All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee," 

though genuine Browning, is not distinctively and un- 
mistakably his, like 

" Irks care the crop-full bird ? Frets doubt the maw-crammed 
beast ? " 

Browning's genial violence continually produced 
strokes which only needed a little access of oddity or 
extravagance to become grotesque. He probably in- 
herited a bias in this direction ; we know that his 
father delighted in drawing grotesque heads, and even 
" declared that he could not draw a pretty face." ^ 
But his grotesqueness is never the mere comic odd- 
ness which sometimes assumes the name. It is a kind 
of monstrosity produced not by whimsical mutilations, 
but by a riot of exuberant power. And he has also a 

• Making allowance, of course, for the more " shaggy " and 
" tousled " character of the English vocabulary as a whole, com- 
pared with Italian. 

3 H. Corkran, Celebrities and /, 



260 BROWNING 

grave and tragic use of the grotesque, in which he 
stands alone. He is, in fact, by far the greatest Eng- 
lish master of grotesque. Childe Roland^ where the 
natural bent of his invention has full fling, abounds 
with grotesque traits which, instead of disturbing the 
romantic atmosphere, infuse into it an element of 
strange, weird, and uncanny mirth, more unearthly 
than any solemnity ; the day shooting its grim red leer 
across the plain, the old worn-out horse with its red, 
gaunt, and coUoped neck a-strain ; or, in Paracelsus^ 
the " Cyclops-like " volcanoes " staring together with 
their eyes on flame," in whose " uncouth pride " God 
tastes a pleasure. Shelley had recoiled from the hor- 
rible idea of a host of these One-eyed monsters ; ^ 
Browning deliberately invokes it. But he can use 
grotesque eff^ects to heighten tragedy as well as ro- 
mance. One source of the peculiar poignancy of the 
Heretic^ s Tragedy is the eerie blend in it of mocking 
familiarity and horror. 

Yet it was not always in this brutal and violent 
guise that Browning imagined power. He was " ever 
a fighter," and had a sense as keen as Byron's, and 
far more joyous, for storm and turbulence ; but he 
had also, as Byron had not, the finer sense which 
feels the universe tense with implicit energies, and the 
profoundest silences of Nature oppressive with the 

' Cf. Locock, Examination of the Shelley MSS. in the Bodleian, 
p. 19. At the words " And monophalmic {sic) Polyphemes who 
haunt the pine-hills, flocked," the writing becomes illegible and the 
stanza is left incomplete. Mr. Forman explains the breaking-off in 
the same way. 



THE POET 261 

burden of life straining to the birth. The stars in 
Saul " beat with emotion " and " shot out in fire the 
strong pain of pent knowledge," and a " gathered in- 
tensity " is " brought to the grey of the hills " ; upon 
the lovers of In a Balcony evening comes " intense 
with yon first trembling star." Wordsworth's 
" quiet " is lonely, pensive, and serene ; his stars are 
not beating with emotion, but " listening quietly." 
Browning's is hectic, bodeful, high-strung. The vast 
featureless Campagna is instinct with " passion," and 
its " peace with joy.' 



" I 



" Quietude — that's a universe in germ — 
The dormant passion needing but a look 
To burst into immense life." ' 

Half the romantic spell of Childe Roland lies in the 
wonderful suggestion of impending catastrophe. The 
gloom is alive with mysterious and impalpable men- 
ace ; the encompassing presences which everything 
suggests and nothing betrays, grow more and more 
oppressively real, until the decisive moment when 
Roland's blast suddenly lets them loose. 

For the power that Browning rejoiced to imagine 
was preeminently sudden ; an unforeseen cataclysm, 
abruptly changing the conditions it found, and sharply 
marking off the future from the past. The same bias 
of imagination which crowded his inner vision of 
space with abrupt angular forms tended to resolve the 
slow, continuous, organic energies of the world before 
his inner vision into explosion and catastrophe. His 

* Two in the Campagna, 2 Asolando : Inapprehensiveness, 



262 BROWNING 

geology neglects the aeons of gradual stratification ; it 
is not the slow stupendous upheaval of continents, 
but the volcanic uprush of the molten ore among the 
rocks, which renew the ancient rapture of the Para- 
celsian God. He is the poet of the sudden surprises 
of plant-life : the bud " bursting unaware " into 
flower, the brushwood about the elm-tree breaking, 
some April morning, into tiny leaf, the rose-flesh 
mushroom born in a night. The " metamorphoses of 
plants," ^ which fascinated Goethe by their inner con- 
tinuity, arrest Browning by their outward abruptness : 
that the flower is implicit in the leaf was a fact of 
much less worth for him than that the bud suddenly 
passes into something so unlike it as the flower. The 
gradual coming on of spring among the mountains 
concentrates itself for him in one instant of epic 
sublimity, — that in which the mountain unlooses its 
year's load of sound, and 

««Fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously down to his 
feet." 2 

Even in the gradual ebb of day he discovers a preg- 
nant instant in which day dies : — 

« For note, when evening shuts, 
A certain moment cuts 
The deed oflF, calls the glory from the grey." 

Hence his love of images which convey these 
sudden transformations, — the worm, putting forth in 

J Metamorphose der PJlanzen. ^ Saul. 



THE POET 263 

autumn its " two wondrous winglets,** ^ the " tran- 
scendental platan," breaking into foliage and flower 
at the summit of its smooth tall bole ; the splendour 
of flame leaping from the dull fuel of gums and straw. 
In such images we see how the simple joy in abrupt 
changes of sensation which belonged to his riotous 
energy of nerve lent support to his peremptory way 
of imagining all change and especially all vital and 
significant becoming. For Browning's trenchant 
imagination things were not gradually evolved; a 
sudden touch loosed the springs of latent power, or 
an overmastering energy from without rushed in like 
a flood. With all his connoisseur's delight in tech- 
nique, language and sound were only spells which un- 
locked a power beyond their capacity to express. 
Music was the " burst of pillared cloud by day and 
pillared fire by night," starting up miraculously from 
the barren wilderness of mechanical expedients,^ and 
poetry " the sudden rose " ^ " breaking in " at the 
bidding of a " brace of rhymes." That in such trans- 
mutations Browning saw one of the most marvellous 
of human powers we may gather from the famous 
lines of Abt Vogler already quoted : — 

« And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man. 
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a 
star." 

• Sordello (Works, i. 123). ' Fijinef xlii. 3 Transcendentalism. 



264 BROWNING 

VII 

4. Joy in Soul 

No saying of Browning's is more familiar than that 
in which he declared " incidents in the development 
of souls " ^ to be to him the supreme interest of poetry. 
The preceding sections of this chapter have suffi- 
ciently shown how far this formula was from exhaust- 
ing the vital springs of Browning's work. "Little 
else " might be " worth study " j but a great many 
other things had captured those rich sensibilities, 
without which the " student's analytic zeal " might 
have devoured the poet. On the other hand, his su- 
preme interest in " incidents in the development of 
souls " was something very different from the demo- 
cratic enthusiasm for humanity, or the Wordsworthian 
joy in the " common tears and mirth " of " every 
village." The quiet routine existence of uneventful 
lives hardly touched him more than the placid qui- 
escence of animal and vegetable existence ; the com- 
monplace of humanity excited in him no mystic rap- 
ture ; the human " primrose by the river's brim," 
merely as one among a throng, was for him pretty 
much what it was to Peter Bell. There was no doubt 
a strain of pantheistic thought in Browning which 
logically involved a treatment of the commonplace 
as profoundly reverent as Wordsworth's own. But 
his passionate faith in the divine love pervading the 
universe did not prevent his turning away resolutely 
from regions of humanity, as of nature, for which his 
' Preface to Sordello^ ed. 1863. 



THE POET 265 

poetic alchemy provided no solvent. His poetic 
throne was not built on " humble truth " ; and he, as 
little as his own Sordello, deserved the eulogy of the 
plausible Naddo upon his verses as based "on man's 
broad nature," and having a " staple of common- 
sense." ^ The homely toiler as such, all members of 
homely undistinguished classes and conditions of men, 
presented, as embodiments of those classes and con- 
ditions, no coign of vantage to his art. In this point, 
human-hearted and democratic as he was, he fell short 
not only of the supreme portrayers of the eternal 
commonplaces of peasant life, — of a Burns, a Words- 
worth, a Millet, a Barnes, — but even of the fastidious 
author of The Northern Farmer. Once, in a moment 
of exaltation, at Venice, Browning had seen Hu- 
manity in the guise of a poor soiled and faded bit of 
Venetian girlhood, and symbolically taken her as the 
future mistress of his art. The programme thus laid 
down was not, like Wordsworth's similarly announced 
resolve to sing of " sorrow barricadoed evermore 
within the walls of cities," simply unfulfilled ; but it 
was far from disclosing the real fountain of his 
inspiration. 

And as Browning deals little with the commonplace 
in human nature, so he passes by with slight concern 
the natural relationships into which men are born, as 
compared with those which they enter by passion or 
choice. The bond of kinship, the love between par- 
ents and children, brothers and sisters, so prolific of 
poetry elsewhere, is singularly rare and unimportant 
1 bordello, ii. 135. 



266 BROWNING 

in Browning, to whom every other variety of the 
love between men and women was a kindling theme. 
The names of husband, of wife, of lover, vibrate for 
him with a poetry more thrilling than any that those 
names excite elsewhere in the poetry of his genera- 
tion ; but the mystic glory which in Blake and 
Wordsworth and Coleridge gathered about uncon- 
scious childhood is all but fled. Children — real chil- 
dren, naive and inarticulate, like little f'ortii — rarely 
appear in his verse, and those that do appear seem 
to have been first gently disengaged, like Pippa, David, 
Theocrite, from all the clinging filaments of Home. 
In its child pathos The Pied Piper — addressed to a 
child — stands all but alone among his works. His 
choicest and loveliest figures are lonely and unat- 
tached. Pippa, David, Pompilia, Sordello, Paracelsus, 
Balaustion, Mildred, Caponsacchi, have no ties of 
home and blood, or only such as work malignly upon 
their fate. Mildred has no mother, and she falls ; 
Sordello moves like a Sheileyan shadow about his 
father's house ; Balaustion breaks away from the ties 
of kindred to become a spiritual daughter of Athens ; 
Paracelsus goes forth, glorious in the possession of 
"the secret of the world," which is his alone; 
Caponsacchi, himself sisterless and motherless, re- 
leases Pompilia from the doom inflicted on her by her 
parents' calculating greed ; the song of Pippa re- 
leases Luigi from the nobler but yet hurtful bondage 
of his mother's love. 

More considerable, but yet relatively slight, is the 
part played in Browning's poetry by those larger and 



THE POET 267 

more complex communities, like the City or the State, 
whose bond of membership, though less involuntary 
than that of family, is still for the most part the ex- 
pression of material necessity or interest, not of spirit- 
ual discernment, passion, or choice. Patriotism, in 
this sense, is touched with interest but hardly with 
conviction, or with striking power, by Browning. 
Casa Guidi windows betrayed too much. Two great 
communities alone moved his imagination profoundly ; 
just those two, namely, in which the bond of common 
political membership was most nearly merged in the 
bond of a common spiritual ideal. And Browning 
puts the loftiest passion for Athens in the mouth of 
an alien, and the loftiest Hebraism in the mouth of a 
Jew of the dispersion. Responsive to the personal 
cry of the solitary hero. Browning rarely caught or 
cared to reproduce the vaguer multitudinous murmur 
of the great mass. In his defining, isolating imagina- 
tion the voice of the solitary soul rings out with thrill- 
ing clearness, but the "still sad music of humanity" 
escapes. The inchoate and the obsolescent, the in- 
distinctness of immaturity, the incipient disintegration 
of decay, the deepening shadow of oblivion, the half- 
instinctive and organic bond of custom, whatever stirs 
the blood but excites only blurred images in the brain, 
and steals into character without passing through the 
gates of passion or of thought, finds imperfect or 
capricious reflection in his verse. 

Browning's interest in " soul " was not, then, a 
diff^used enjoyment of human nature as such. But, 
on the other hand, human nature stood for too much 



268 BROWNING 

with him, his sense of what all personality at the low- 
est implies was too keen, to allow him to relish, or 
make much use of, those unpsychological amalgams of 
humanity and thought, — the personified abstractions. 
Whether in the base form branded by Wordsworth, 
or in the lofty and noble form of Keats's " Autumn '' 
and Shelley's " West Wind," this powerful instru- 
ment of poetic expression was touched only in fugitive 
and casual strokes to music by Browning's hand. 
Personality, to interest him, had to possess a possible 
status in the world of experience. It had to be of the 
earth, and like its inhabitants. The stamp of fash- 
ioning intelligence, or even of blind myth-making in- 
stinct, alienates and warns him off. He climbs to no 
Olympus or Valhalla, he wanders through no Empy- 
rean. His rare divinities tread the visible and solid 
ground. His Artemis " prologizes " to, his Herakles 
plays a part in, a human drama; and both are as 
frankly human themselves as the gods of Homer. 
Shelley and Keats had rekindled about the faded forms 
of the Greek gods the elemental Nature-worship from 
which they had started ; Apollo, Hyperion, are again 
glorious symbols of the " all-seeing " and all-vitalising 
Sun. Browning, far from seeking to recover their 
primitive value, treats their legends, with the easy 
rationalism of Euripides or Ferishtah, as a mine of 
ethical and psychological illustration. He can play 
charmingly, in later years, with the myth of Pan and 
Luna, of Arion and the dolphin,^ or of Apollo and 
the Fates, but idyl gets the better of nature feeling ; 
1 Fijine at the Fair, Ixxviii. 



THE POET 269 

" maid-moon *' Luna is far more maid than moon. 
The spirit of autumn does not focus itself for him, as 
for Keats, in some symbolic shape, slumbering among 
the harvest swathes or at watch over the fragrant 
cider-press ; it breaks up into the vivid concrete traits 
of The Englishman in Italy. The spirit of humanity 
is not shadowed forth in a Prometheus, but realised in 
a Caponsacchi. 

VIII 

What, then, in the vast multifarious field of soul-life 
were the points of special attraction for Browning ? 
To put it in a word, the same fundamental instincts 
of the senses and the imagination which we have 
watched shaping the visible world of his poetry, equally 
determined the complexion of its persons. The joy 
in pure and intense colour, in abruptness of line and 
intricacy of structure, in energetic movement and sud- 
den disclosure and transformation, — all these charac- 
teristics have their analogies in Browning's feeling for 
the complexion, morphology, and dynamics of what 
he calls the soul. Just as this lover of crowded laby- 
rinthine forms surprises us at first by his masses of 
pure and simple colour, untroubled by blur or modu- 
lation, so in the long procession of Browning's men of 
the world, adepts in the tangled lore of experience, 
there mingle from time to time figures radiant with a 
pure, intense, immaculate spiritual light, — Pippa, Pom- 
pilia, the David of the earlier Saul. Something of the 
strange charm of these naively beautiful beings springs 
from their isolation. That detachment from the bonds 



270 BROWNING 

of home and kindred which was noticed above in its 
negative aspect, appears now as a source of positive 
expressiveness. They start into unexplained existence 
like the sudden beauty of flames from straw. Brown- 
ing is no poet of the home, but he is peculiarly the 
poet of a kind of spirituality which subsists independ- 
ently of earthly ties without disdaining them, lonely but 
unconscious of loneliness. Pippa would hardly be so 
recognisably steeped as she is in the very atmosphere 
of Browning's mind, but for this loneliness of hers, — 
the loneliness neither of the exile nor of the anchor- 
ite, but native, spontaneous, and serene. Wordsworth 
sometimes recalls it, but he is apt to invest his lonely 
beings with a mystic glamour which detaches them 
from humanity as well as from their fellow men. The 
little " H. C, six years old,'* is "a dewdrop which the 
morn brings forth," that 

" at the touch of wrong, without a strife, 
Slips in a moment out of life." 

Pippa, with all her ideality and her upward gaze, has her 
roots in earth ; she is not the dewdrop but the flower. 
But loneliness belongs in a less degree to almost all 
characters which seriously engaged Browning's imagi- 
nation. His own intense isolating self-consciousness 
infused itself into them. Each is a little island king- 
dom, judged and justified by its own laws, and not en- 
tirely intelligible to the foreigner. Hence his persist- 
ent use of the dramatic monologue. Every man had 
his point of view, and his right to state his case. 
" Where you speak straight out," Browning wrote in 



THE POET 271 

effect, as we saw, in one of his earliest letters to his 
future wife, " I break the white light in the seven 
colours of men and wonnen " ; ^ and each colour had 
its special truth and worth. His study of character is 
notoriously occupied with failures of transit between 
mind and mind. His lovers miss the clue ; if they 
find it, as in By the Fireside^ the collapse of the barrier 
walls is told with triumph, and the spell of the forests 
invoked to explain it. 

And within the viewless intrenchments thus drawn 
about character Browning's imagination was prone to 
reproduce the abrupt and intricate play of line and 
surface which fascinated his outward eye. " The 
care-bit, erased, broken-up beauties ever took my 
taste," says, in Sordello^ the creator of the pure flame- 
like soul-beauty of Pompilia and Pippa ; very much 
as the crumbling and blistering of the frescoed walls 
are no less needful to the charm he feels in his South- 
ern villa than the " blue breadth of sea without 
break " expanding before it. The abruptness, the 
sharp transitions, the startling and picturesque con- 
trasts which mark so much of the talk of his persons, 
reflect not merely his agility of mind but his aesthetic 
relish for the Gothic richness and fretted intricacy 
that result. The bishop of St. Praxed's monologue, 
for instance, is a sort of live mosaic, — anxious en- 
treaty to his sons, diapered with gloating triumph 
over old Gandulph. The larger tracts of soul-life 
are apt in his hands to break up into shifting phases, 
or to nodulate into sudden crises ; here a Blougram, 
1 R. B. to E. B. B., i. 6. 



272 BROWNING 

with his " chess-board " of faith diversified by doubt, 
there a Paracelsus, advancing by complex alternations 
of " aspiring " and " attainment." Everywhere in 
Browning the slow continuities of existence are ob- 
scured by vivid moments, — the counterpart of his 
bursts of sunlight through rifts and chinks. A mo- 
ment of speech with Shelley stands out, a brilliant 
handbreadth of time between the blank before and 
after ; a moment of miserable failure blots out the 
whole after-life of Martin Relph ; a moment of 
heroism stamps once for all the quality of Clive ; the 
whole complex story of Pompilia focusses in the 
"splendid minute and no more" in which she is 
" saved " ; the lover's whole life is summed up in 
" some moment's product " when " the soul declares 
itself,"^ or utters the upgarnered poetry of its passion ; 
or else, conversely, he looks back on a moment 
equally indelible, when the single chance of love was 
missed. " It once might have been, once only," is 
the refrain of the lover's regret in Browning, as 
" once and only once and for one only " is the key- 
note of his triumph. In the contours of event and 
circumstance, as in those of material objects, he loves 
jagged angularity, not harmonious curve. " Our in- 
terest's in the dangerous edge of things," — 

" The honest thief, the tender murderer, 
The superstitious atheist ; " 

where an alien strain violently crosses the natural 

course of kind ; and these are only extreme examples 

1 By the Fireside. 



THE POET 273 

of the abnormal nature which always allured and 
detained Browning's imagination, though it was not 
always the source of its highest achievement. Ivano- 
vitch, executing justice under the forms of murder, 
Caponsacchi, executing mercy under the forms of an 
elopement, the savagery of Halbert and Hob unnerved 
by an abrupt reminiscence, — it is in these suggestive 
and pregnant situations, at the meeting-points of ap- 
parently irreconcilable classes and kinds, that Brown- 
ing habitually found or placed those of his characters 
who represent any class or kind at all. 

The exploring, in-and-out scrutinising instincts of 
Browning's imagination equally left their vivid im- 
press upon his treatment of character. If the sharp 
nodosities of character caught his eye, its mysterious 
recesses and labyrinthine alleys allured his curiosity ; 
this lover of " clefts," this pryer among tangled locks 
and into the depths of flower-bells, peered into all the 
nooks and chambers of the soul with inexhaustible en- 
terprise. It is hard to deny that even The Ring and the 
Book itself sujfFers something from the unflagging zest 
with which the poet pursues all the windings of popular 
speculation, all the fretwork of Angelo de Hyacinthis's 
forensic and domestic futilities. The poem is a great 
poetic Mansion, with many chambers, and he will 
lead us sooner or later to its inner shrine ; but on the 
way there are " closets to search and alcoves to im- 
portune," — 

" The day wears, 
And door succeeds door, 

We try the fresh fortune, 
Range the wide house from the wing to the centre." 



274 BROWNING 

For the most part, after the not wholly successful 
experiment of direct analysis in Sordello^ he chose to 
make his men and women the instruments of their 
own illumination ; and this was a second source of his 
delight in the dramatic monologue. He approached 
all problematic character with a bias towards disbe- 
lieving appearances, which was fed, if not generated, 
by that restlessly exploring instinct of an imagination 
that spontaneously resolved surface and solidity into 
integument and core. Not that Browning always 
displays the core ; on the contrary, after elaborately 
removing an imposing mask from what appears to be 
a face, he will hint that the unmasked face is itself a 
mask. " For Blougram, he believed, say, half he 
spoke.*' Browning is less concerned to " save " the 
subjects of his so-called " Special Pleadings " than to 
imagine them divested of the gross disguises of public 
rumour about them ; not naked as God made them, 
but clothed in the easy undress of their own subtly 
plausible illusions about themselves. But the optimist 
in him is always alert, infusing into the zest of ex- 
ploration a cheery faith that behind the last investi- 
ture lurks always some soul of goodness, and wel- 
coming with a sudden lift of verse the escape of some 
diviner gleam through the rifts, such as Blougram*s — 

" Just when we're safest comes a sunset touch." 

Yet it is hardly a paradox to say that his faith throve 
upon the obstacles it overcame. He imagined yet 
more vividly than he saw, and the stone wall which 
forbade vision but whetted imagination, acquired an 



THE POET 275 

ideal merit in his eyes because it was not an open 
door. In later life he came with growing persistence 
to regard the phenomenal world as a barrier of illusion 
between man and truth. But instead of chilling his 
faith, the obstacle only generated that poet's philosophy 
of the " value of a lie " which perturbs the less expe- 
rienced reader of Fifine. " Truth " was " forced to 
manifest itself through falsehood,'* won thence by the 
excepted eye, at the rare season, for the happy mo- 
ment, till " through the shows of sense, which ever 
proving false still promise to be true," the soul of man 
worked its way to its final union with the soul of 
God.i 

And here at length if not before we have a clear 
glimpse of the athlete who lurks behind the explorer. 
Browning's joy in imagining impediment and illusion 
was only another aspect of his joy in the spiritual en- 
ergy which answers to the spur of difficulty and 
" works " through the shows of sense ; and this other 
joy found expression in a poetry of soul yet more 
deeply tinged with the native hue of his mind. " From 
the first. Power was, I knew ; " and souls were the 
very central haunt and focus of its play. Not that 
strong natures, as such, have much part in Browning's 
poetic-world ; the strength that allured his imagina- 
tion was not the strength that is rooted in nerve or 
brain, slowly enlarging with the build of the organ- 
ism, but the strength that has suddenly to be begotten 
or infused, that leaps by the magic of spiritual influ- 
1 Fijine at the Fair^ cxxiv. 



276 BROWNING 

ence from heart to heart. If Browning multiplies 
and deepens the demarcations among material things, 
he gives his souls a rare faculty of transcending them. 
Bright spiritual beings like Pippa shed their souls in- 
nocently and unwittingly about like a spilth of 
"X-rays," and the irradiation penetrates instantly the 
dense opposing integuments of passion, cupidity, and 
worldliness. At all times in his life these accesses of 
spiritual power occupied his imagination. Cristina*s 
momentary glance and the Lady of Tripoli's dreamed- 
of face lift their devotees to completeness : — 

" She has lost me, I have gained her, 
Her soul's mine, and now grown perfect 
I shall pass my life's remainder." 

Forty years later. Browning told with far greater 
realistic power and a grim humour suited to the theme, 
the " transmutation " of Ned Bratts. Karshish has 
his sudden revealing flash as he ponders the letter of 
Abib :— 

« The very God ! Think, Abib, dost thou think, — 
So the All-great were the All-loving too " — 

and the boy David his prophetic vision. A yet more 
splendid vision breaks from the seemingly ruined brain 
of the dying Paracelsus, and he has a gentler comrade 
in the dying courtier, who starts up from his darkened 
chamber crying that — 

" Spite of thick air and closed doors 
God told him it was June, — when harebells grow, 
And all that kings could ever give or take 
Would not be precious as those blooms to me." 



THE POET 277 

But it is not only in these magical transitions and 
transformations that Browning's joy in soul was de- 
cisively coloured by his joy in power. A whole class 
of his characters — the most familiarly " Browning- 
esque " division of them all — was shaped under the 
sway of this master-passion; the noble army of 
" strivers " who succeed and of " strivers " who fail, 
baffled artists and rejected lovers who mount to higher 
things on stepping-stones of their frustrated selves, 
like the heroes of Old Painters in Florence^ and The 
Last Ride Together^ and The Lost Mistress ; and on the 
other hand, the artists and lovers who fail for want of 
this saving energy, like the Duke and Lady of the 
Statue and the Bust^ like Andrea del Sarto and the 
Unknown Painter. But his very preoccupation with 
Art and with Love itself sprang mainly from his 
peculiar joy in the ardent putting-forth of soul. No 
kind of vivid consciousness was indifferent to him, but 
the luxurious receptivity of the spectator or of a pas- 
sively beloved mistress touched him little compared 
with the faintest pulsation of the artist's " love of 
loving, rage of knowing, feeling, seeing the absolute 
truth of things," of the lover's passion for union with 
another soul. When he describes effects of music or 
painting, he passes instinctively over to the standpoint 
of the composer or the performer; shows us Hugues 
and Andrea themselves at the organ, or the easel ; and 
instead of feeling the world turned into " an unsub- 
stantial faery place " by the magic of the cuckoo or 
the thrush, strikes out playful theories of the pro- 
fessional methods of these songsters, — the cuckoo's 



278 BROWNING 

monopoly of the " minor third/' the thrush's wise 
way of repeating himself " lest you should think he 
never could recapture his first fine careless rapture." 
Suffering enters Browning's poetry almost never as 
the artless wail of the helpless stricken thing j the in- 
tolerable pathos of Te Banks and Braes^ or of 

" We twa hae paidl't in the burn 
Frae morning sun till dine," 

belonged to a side of primitive emotion to which 
"artificial" poets like Tennyson were far more sen- 
sitive than he. Suffering began to interest him when 
the wail passed into the fierceness of vindictive pas- 
sion, as in The Confessional^ or into the outward calm 
of a self-subjugated spirit, as in Any Wife to Any Hus- 
bandy or A Woman's Last Word : or into reflective and 
speculative, if bitter, retrospect, as in The Worst of It 
or fames Lee's Wife, And happiness, equally, — even 
the lover's happiness, — needed, to satisfy Browning, 
to have some leaven of challenging disquiet ; the lover 
must have something to fear, or something to forgive, 
some hostility, or guilt, or absence, or death, to brave. 
Or the rapturous union of lovers must be remembered 
with a pang, when they have quarrelled ; or its joy be 
sobered by recalling the perilous hairbreadth chances 
incurred in achieving it {By the Fireside) — 

« Oh, the little more, and how much it is ! 

And the little less, and what worlds away! 
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss. 
Or a breath suspend the blood's best play, 
And life be a proof of this ! " 



THE POET 279 

Further, his joy in soul drew into the sphere of his 
poetry large tracts of existence which lay wholly or 
partly outside the domain of soul itself. The world 
of the lower animals hardly touched the deeper chords 
of his thought or emotion ; but he watched their 
activities with a very genuine and constant delight, 
and he took more account of their pangs than he did 
of the soul-serving throes of man.^ His imagina- 
tive selection among the countless types of these 
••' low kinds " follows the lead of all those forms of 
primitive joy which we have traced in his types of 
men and women : here it is the quick-glancing in- 
tricate flights of birds or insects, the flitting of quick 
sandpipers in and out of the marl, or of flies about 
an old wall ; now the fierce contrasts of hue, angular- 
ity, and grotesque deformity all at once in Caliban's 
beasts : — 

" Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech ; 
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, 
That floats and feeds ; a certain badger brown 
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye 
By moonlight ; " 

or it is the massive power of the desert lion, in The 
Glove^ or the bright asthereal purity of the butterfly 
fluttering over the swimmer's head, with its 

" membraned wings 
So wonderful, so wide. 
So sun-suffused ; " 2 

* Donald. 

5 Some of these examples are from Mr. Brooke's excellent 
chapter on Browning's Treatment of Nature. 



280 BROWNING 

or the cheery self-dependence of the solitary insect. 
" I always love those wild creatures God sets up 
for themselves," he wrote to Miss Barrett, " so in- 
dependently, so successfully, with their strange happy 
minute inch of a candle, as it were, to light them." ^ 
Finally, Browning's joy in soul flowed over also 
upon the host of lifeless things upon which " sr ^ '' 
itself has in any way been spent. To bear the : 

of Man's art and toil, to have been hewn or mo aed 
or built, compounded or taken to pieces, by human 
handiwork, was to acquire a certain romantic allure- 
ment for Browning's imagination hardly found in any 
other poet in the same degree. The " artificial prod- 
ucts " of civilised and cultured life were for him not 
merely instruments of poetic expression but springs 
of poetic joy. No poetry can dispense with images 
from " artificial " things ; Wordsworth himself does 
not always reject them ; with most poets they are 
commoner, merely because they are better known ; 
but for Browning the impress of " our meddling in- 
tellect " added exactly the charm and stimulus which 
complete exemption from it added for Wordsworth. 
His habitual imagery is fetched, not from flowers or 
clouds or moving winds and waters, but from wine- 
cups, swords and sheaths, lamps, tesselated pavements, 
chess-boards, pictures, houses, ships, shops. Most of 
these appealed also to other instincts, — to his joy in 
brilliant colour, abrupt line, intricate surface, or 
violent emotion. But their " artificiality " was an 
added attraction. The wedge, for instance, appeals 
> To E. B. B., 5th Jan., 1846. 



THE POET 281 

to him not only by its angularity and its rending 
thrust, but as a weapon contrived by man's wit and 
driven home by his muscle. The cup appeals to him 
not only by its shape, and by the rush of the foaming 
wine, but as fashioned by the potter's wheel, and 
flashing at the festal board. His delight in complex 
technicalities, in the tangled issues of the law-courts, 
2 e intertwining harmonies of Bach, sprang from 

hh y in the play of mind as well as from his joy 
in mere intricacy as such. His mountains are 
gashed and cleft and carved not only because their 
intricacy of craggy surface or the Titanic turmoil of 
mountain-shattering delights him, but also because 
he loves to suggest the deliberate axe or chisel of 
the warrior or the artist Man. He turns the quiet 
vicissitudes of nature into dexterous achievements of 
art. If he does not paint or dye the meads, he turns 
the sunset clouds into a feudal castle, shattered slowly 
with a visible mace ; the morning sun pours into 
Pippa's chamber as from a wine-bowl ; and Fiiine's 
ear is 

" cut 
Thin as a dusk-leaved rose carved from a cocoanut." ^ 

Sordello's slowly won lyric speech is called 

" a rude 
Armour . . . hammered out, in time to be 
Approved beyond the Roman panoply 
Melted to make it." 2 

And thirty years later he used the kindred but 

> Fifine at the Fair, ii. 325. 2 Sordello, i. 135. 



282 BROWNING 

more recondite simile of a ring with its fortifying 
alloy, to symbolise the welded IVahrheit and Dichtung 
of his greatest poem. 

Between Dichtung and Wahrheit there was, indeed, 
in Browning's mind, a closer affinity than that simile 
suggests. His imagination was a factor in his ap- 
prehension of truth ; his " poetry " cannot be de- 
tached from his interpretation of life, nor his inter- 
pretation of life from his poetry. Not that all parts 
of his apparent teaching belong equally to his poetic 
mind. On the contrary, much of it was derived 
from traditions of which he never shook himself 
clear ; much from the exercise of a speculative rea- 
son which, though incomparably agile, was neither 
well disciplined in its methods nor particularly 
orginal in its grasp of principles. But with the 
vitalising heart of his faith neither tradition nor rea- 
soning had so much to do as that logic of the imagina- 
tion by which great poets often implicitly enunciate 
what the after-thinker slowly works out. The char- 
acteristic ways of Browning's poetry, the fundamental 
joys on which it fed, of which the present chapter at- 
tempts an account, by no means define the range or 
the limits of his interpreting intellect, but they mark 
the course of its deepest currents, the permanent 
channels which its tides overflow, but to which in the 
last resort they return. In the following chapter we 
shall have to study these fluctuating movements of 
his explicit and formulated thought, and to distinguish, 
if we may, the ground-tone of the deep waters from 
the more resonant roll of the shifting tides. 



CHAPTER X 

THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE 

His voice sounds loudest and also clearest for the things that as 
a race we like best ; . . . the fascination of faith, the accept- 
ance of life, the respect for its mysteries, the endurance of its 
charges, the vitality of the will, the validity of character, the 
beauty of action, the seriousness, above all, of great human passion. 

— Henry James. 

I 

The trend of speculative thought in Europe during 
the century which preceded the emergence of Brown- 
ing may be described as a progressive integration along 
several distinct lines of the great regions of existence 
which common beliefs, resting on a still vigorous 
medievalism, thrust apart. Nature was brought into 
nearer relation with Man, and Man with God, and 
God with Nature and with Man. In one aspect, not 
the least striking, it was a " return to Nature " ; econ- 
omists from Adam Smith to Malthus worked out the 
laws of man's dependence upon the material world ; 
poets and idealists from Rousseau to Wordsworth dis- 
covered in a life " according to nature " the ideal for 
man ; sociologists from Hume to Bentham, and from 
Burke to Coleridge, applied to human society concep- 
tions derived from physics or from biology, and em- 
phasised all that connects it with the mechanical 
aggregate of atoms, or with the organism. 

283 



284 BROWNING 

In another aspect it was a return to God. If the 
scientific movement tended to subjugate man to a 
Nature in which, as Laplace said, there was no occa- 
sion for God, Wordsworth saw both in Nature and in 
man a spirit " deeply interfused " ; and the great con- 
temporary school of German philosophy set all ethical 
thinking in a new perspective by its original handling 
of the old thesis that duty is a realisation of the will 
of God. 

But, in yet another aspect, it was a return to Man. 
If Man was brought nearer to Nature and to God, it 
was to a Nature and to a God which had themselves 
acquired, for him, closer affinities with humanity. He 
divined, with Wordsworth, his own joy, with Shelley 
his own love, in the breathing flower ; he saw with 
Hegel in the Absolute Spirit a power vitally present 
in all man's secular activities and pursuits. And these 
interpreting voices of poets and philosophers were but 
the signs of less articulate sensibilities far more widely 
diffused, which were in eff^ect bringing about a mani- 
fold expansion and enrichment of normal, mental, and 
emotional life. Scott made the romantic past, Byron 
and Goethe, in their different ways, the Hellenic past, 
a living element of the present ; and Fichte, calling 
upon his countrymen to emancipate themselves, in the 
name not of the " rights of men " but of the genius 
of the German people, uttered the first poignant 
recognition of national life as a glorious vesture array- 
ing the naked body of the mdividual member, not an 
aggregate of other units competing with or controlling 
him. 



THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE 285 

In this complicated movement Browning played a 
very notable and memorable part. But it was one of 
which the first generation of his readers was entirely, 
and he himself to a great extent, unconscious, and 
which his own language often disguises or conceals. 
Of all the poets of the century he had the clearest 
and most confident vision of the working of God in 
the world, the most buoyant faith in the divine origin 
and destiny of man. Half his poetry is an effort to 
express, in endless variety of iteration, the nearness 
of God, to unravel the tangled circumstance of human 
life, and disclose everywhere infinity enmeshed amid 
the intricacies of the finite. 

On the side of Nature his interest was less keen 
and his vision less subtle. His " visitations of the 
living God'* came to him by other avenues than those 
opened by Wordsworth's ecstatic gaze, " in love and 
holy passion," upon outward beauty. Only limited 
classes of natural phenomena appealed to him power- 
fully at all, the swift and sudden upheavals and catas- 
trophes, the ardours and accesses, the silence that 
thrills with foreboding and suspense. For continui- 
ties, both of the mechanical and the organic kind, he 
lacked sense. We have seen how his eye fastened 
everywhere upon the aspects of life least suggestive 
of either iron uniformity or harmonious evolution. 
The abrupt demarcations which he everywhere im- 
poses or discovers were the symptom of a primitive 
ingrained atomism of thought which all the synthetic 
strivings of a God-intoxicated intellect could not en- 
tirely overcome. 



286 BROWNING 

II 

His metaphysical thinking thus became an effort to 
reconcile an all-embracing synthesis with a sense of 
individuality as stubborn and acute as ever man had. 
Body and Soul, Nature and Spirit, Man and God, 
Good and Evil, he presented now as cooperative or 
alien, now as hostile antagonists or antitheses. That 
their opposition is not ultimate, that evil is at bottom 
a form of good, and all finite existence a passing mode 
of absolute being, was a conviction towards which his 
thought on one side constantly strove, which it occa- 
sionally touched, but in which it could not securely 
rest. Possessed by the thirst for absoluteness, he 
vindicated the " infinity " of God and the soul by 
banishing all the " finiteness " of sense into a limbo 
of illusion. The infinite soul, imprisoned for life in 
a body which at every moment clogs its motion and 
dims its gaze, fights its way through the shows of 
sense,^ " which ever proving false still promise to be 
true," until death opens the prison-gate and restores 
the captive to its infinity. Sorrow and evil were 
stains imposed by Time upon the white radiance of an 
eternal being ; and Browning sometimes rose, though 
with a less sure step, to the dizzier height of holding 
Time itself to be unreal, and the soul's earthly life 
not an episode in an endless sequence, but a dream of 
progressive change imposed upon a changeless and 
timeless essence. 

But there were, as has been said, elements in 
Browning's mental make which kept this abstract and 
1 Fijine at the Fair. 



THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE 287 

formal theory, fortified though it was by theological 
prepossessions, in check. His most intense conscious- 
ness, his most definite grip upon reality, was too closely 
bound up with the collisions and jostlings, the limits 
and angularities, of the world of the senses, for the 
belief in their illusoriness easily to hold its ground. 
This " infinite soul " palpably had its fullest and 
richest existence in the very heart of finite things. 
Wordsworth had turned for " intimations of immor- 
tality " to the remembered intuitions of childhood ; 
Browning found them in every pang of baffled aspi- 
ration and frustrate will. Hence there arose in the 
very midst of this realm of illusion a new centre of 
reality ; the phantoms took on solid and irrefragable 
existence, and refused to take to flight when the cock- 
crow announced that " Time was done. Eternity 
begun." 

Body and Time had in general too strong a grip 
upon him to be resolved into illusion. His actual 
pictures of departed souls suggest a state very unlike 
that reversion of the infinite spirit which had been 
thrust upon Matter and distended in Time, to the 
timeless Infinitude it had forgone. It does not es- 
cape from Time, but only passes on from the limited 
section of Time known as life, into another section, 
without limit, known as Eternity. And if it escapes 
from Body, at least Browning represents his departed 
soul more boldly than any other modern poet in a 
garb of flesh. Evelyn Hope, when she wakens in 
another world, will find her unknown lover's leaf in 
her hand, and " remember, and understand.'* 



288 BROWNING 

And just as Matter and Time invade Browning's 
spiritual eternity, so his ideal of conduct for man 
while still struggling with finite conditions casts its 
shadow on to the state of immortal release. Two 
conceptions, in fact, of the life after death, corre- 
sponding to divergent aspects of his thought, contend 
in Browning's mind. Now it is a state of emancipa- 
tion from earthly limits, — when the " broken arcs " 
become " perfect rounds " and " evil " is transformed 
into " so much good more," and " reward and repose " 
succeed the "struggles"^ by which they have been 
won. But at times he startles the devout reader by 
foreshadowing not a sudden transformation but a con- 
tinuation of the slow educative process of earth in a 
succession of preliminary heavens before the consum- 
mate state is reached. " Progress," in short, was too 
deeply ingrained in Browning's conception of what 
was ultimately good, and therefore ultimately real, not 
to find entrance into his heaven, were it only by some 
casual backdoor of involuntary intuition. Even in 
that more gracious state " achievement lacked a 
gracious somewhat"^ to his indomitable fighting in- 
stinct. 

" Soul resteth not, and mine must still advance," 

he had said in Pauline^ and the soul that ceased to 
advance ceased for Browning, in his most habitual 
mood, to exist. The " infinity " of the soul was not 
so much a gift as a destiny, a power of hungering for 
ever after an ideal completeness which it was indefi- 
> Saul, xvii. 2 One Word More. 



THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE 289 

nitely to pursue and to approach, but not to reach. 
Far from having to await a remote emancipation to 
become completely itself, the soul's supremest life was 
in its hours of heroic stress, when it kept some dragon 
of unbelief quiet underfoot, like Michael, 

" Who stands calm, just because he feels it writhe." 

It was at this point that the athletic energy of Brown- 
ing's nature told most palpably upon the complexion 
of his thought. It did not affect its substance, but it 
altered the bearing of the parts, giving added weight 
to all its mundane and positive elements. It gave 
value to every challenging obstruction akin to that 
which allured him to every angular and broken sur- 
face, to all the " evil " which balks our easy percep- 
tion of "good." ^ Above all, by idealising effort, it 
created a new ethical end which every strenuous spirit 
could not merely strive after but fulfil, every day of 
its mortal life ; and thus virtually transferred the focus 
of interest and importance from " the next world's 
reward and repose " to the vital " struggles in this." 

Browning's characteristic conception of the nature 
and destiny of man was thus not a compact and con- 
sistent system, but a group of intuitions nourished 
from widely diiTerent regions of soul and sense, and 
undergoing, like the face of a great actor, striking 
changes of expression without material change of 
feature under the changing incidence of stress and 
glow. The ultimate gist of his teaching was pre- 
sented through the medium of conceptions proper to 
Bishop Blougram, 



290 



BROWNING 



another school of thought, which, like a cryptogram, 
convey one meaning but express another. He had to 
work with categories like finite and infinite, which the 
atomic habits of his mind thrust into exclusive oppo- 
sition ; whereas the profoundest thing that he had to 
say was that the " infinite " has to be achieved in and 
through the finite, that just the most definitely out- 
lined action, the most individual purpose, the most 
sharply expressive thought, the most intense and per- 
sonal passion, are the points or saliency in life which 
most surely catch the radiance of eternity they break. 
The white light was " blank " until shattered by re- 
fraction ; and Browning is less Browning when he 
glories in its unbroken purity than when he rejoices 
in the prism, whose obstruction alone 

*' shows aright 
The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light 
Into the jewelled bow from blankest white." * 

We have now to watch Browning's efforts to in- 
terpret this profound and intimate persuasion of his in 
terms of the various conceptions at his disposal.^ 

Ill 

Beside the soul, there was something else that 
" stood sure " for Browning — namely, God. Here, 
too, a theological dogma, steeped in his ardent mind, 
acquired a new potency for the imagination, and a 

* Deaf and Dumb. 

2 On the matter of this section cf. Mr. A. C. Pigou's acute and 
lucid discussions, Browning as a Religious Teacher ^ ch. viii. and ix. 



THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE 2gi 

more vital nexus with man and nature than any other 
poet of the century had given it. And here, too, the 
mystic and the positive strains of Browning's genius 
wrought together, impressing themselves equally in 
that wonderful Browningesque universe in which 
every germ seems to be itself a universe " needing 
but a look to burst into immense life," and infinity is 
ever at hand, behind a closed door. The whole of his 
theology was an attempt to express consistently two 
convictions, rarely found of the same intensity in the 
same brain, of the divineness of the universe and the 
individuality of man. 

The mechanical Creator of Paley and the deists 
could never have satisfied him. From the first he 
" saw God everywhere." There was in him the stuff 
of which the " God-intoxicated " men are made, and 
he had moments, like that expressed in one of his 
most deliberate and emphatic personal utterances, in 
which all existence seemed to be the visible Face of 
God — 

" Become my universe that feels and knows." * 

He clearly strained towards the sublime pantheistic 
imaginings of the great poets of the previous genera- 
tion, — Wordsworth's " Something far more deeply 
interfused," Shelley's " One spirit's plastic stress," 
and Goethe's Erdgeist^ who weaves the eternal vesture 
of God at the loom of Time. The dying vision of 
Paracelsus is as sublime as these, and marks Brown- 
ing's nearest point of approach to the ways of 

1 Epilogue. 



292 



BROWNING 



thought they embody. In all the vitalities of the 
world, from the uncouth play of the volcano to the 
heaven-and-earth transfiguring mind of man, God 
was present, sharing their joy. But even here the 
psychological barrier is apparent, against which all the 
surge of pantheistic impulse in Browning broke in 
vain. This God of manifold joys was sharply de- 
tached from his universe ; he was a sensitive and 
sympathetic spectator, not a pervading spirit. In 
every direction human personality opposed rigid fron- 
tiers which even the infinite God could not pass, and 
no poet less needed the stern warning which he ad- 
dressed to German speculation against the " gigantic 
stumble " ^ of making them one. The mystic's dream 
of seeing all things in God, the Hegelian thesis of a 
divine mind realising itself in and through the human, 
found no lodgment in a consciousness of mosaic-like 
clearness dominated by the image of an incisively 
individual and indivisible self. In later life the sharp 
lines which he drew from the first about individual 
personality became a ring-fence within which each 
man " cultivated his plot," ^ managing independently 
as he might the business of his soul. The divine 
love might wind inextricably about him,^ the dance 
of plastic circumstance at the divine bidding impress 
its rhythms upon his life,^ he retained his human 
identity inviolate, a " point of central rock " amid the 
welter of the waves.^ His love might be a " spark from 

1 Christmas- Eve. 2 Ferishtah. 

3 Easter-Day. "* Rabbi ben Ezra. 

5 Epilogue. 



THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE 293 

God's fire," but it was his own, to use as he would j 
he " stood on his own stock of love and power." ^ 

IV 

In this sharp demarcation of man's being from 
God*s, Browning never faltered. On the contrary, 
the individualising animus which there found expres- 
sion impelled him to raise more formidable barriers 
about man, and to turn the ring-fence which secured 
him from intrusion into a high wall which cut off his 
view. In other words, the main current of Brown- 
ing's thought sets strongly towards a sceptical criticism 
of human knowledge. At the outset he stands on the 
high a priori ground of Plato. Truth in its fulness 
abides in the soul, an " imprisoned splendour," which 
intellect quickened by love can elicit, which moments 
of peculiar insight, deep joy, and sorrow, and the 
coming on of death, can release. But the gross flesh 
hems it in, wall upon wall, " a baffling and perverting 
carnal mesh," ^ the source of all error. The process 
of discovery he commonly conceived as an advance 
through a succession of Protean disguises of truth, 
each " one grade above its last presentment," ^ until, 
at the rare moment, by the excepted eye, the naked 
truth was grasped. But Browning became steadily 
more reluctant to admit that these fortunate moments 
ever occurred, that the Proteus was ever caught. 
Things would be known to the soul as they were 
known to God only when it was emancipated by 
death. Infinity receded into an ever more inac- 

' Christmas-Eve. » Paracelsus. 2 Fijine cxxiv. 



294 BROWNING 

cessible remoteness from the finite. For the speaker 
in Christmas- Eve man's mind was the image of God's, 
reflecting trace for trace his absolute knowledge ; for 
Francis Furini the bare fact of his own existence is 
all he knows, a narrow rock-spit of knowledge en- 
isled in a trackless ocean of ignorance. Thus for 
Browning, in differing moods and contexts, the mind 
of man becomes now a transparent pane, opening di- 
rectly upon the truth as God sees it, now a coloured 
lens, presenting truth in blurred refraction, now an 
opaque mirror idly bodying forth his futile and illusive 
dreams. 

These conflicting views were rooted in different 
elements of Browning's many-sided nature. His vivid 
intuition of his own self-consciousness formed a stand- 
ing type of seemingly absolute immediate knowledge, 
to which he stubbornly clung. When the optimism of 
the " Head " was discredited, passion-fraught instinct, 
under the name of the Heart, came to the rescue, and 
valiantly restored its authority. On the other hand, a 
variety of subtle attractions drew him on to give " illu- 
sion " a wider and wider scope. Sheer joy in battle 
had no small share. The immortal and infinite soul, 
projected among the shows of sense, could not be ex- 
pected to do its part worthily if it saw through them : 
it had to believe its enemies real enemies, and its war- 
fare a rational warfare ; it had to accept time and 
place, and good and evil, as the things they seem. To 
have a perfectly clear vision of truth as it is in God was 
to be dazzled with excess of light, to grope and fumble 
about the world for as it is man, like the risen Lazarus — 



THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE 295 

" witless of the size, the sum, 
The value in proportion of all things, 
Or whether it be little or be much." 

The mystic who withdrew from the struggle with phan- 
toms to gaze upon eternal realities was himself the 
victim of the worst illusions ; while the hero who 
plunged into that struggle was training his soul, and 
thereby getting a grip upon ultimate truth. Thus 
Browning's passionate and reiterated insistence upon 
the illusiveness of knowledge was rooted in his inalien- 
able faith in the worth and reality of moral conflict. 
The infinite soul realised itself most completely when 
it divested itself of the trappings of its infinity, and it 
worked out God's law most implicitly when it ignored 
God's point of view. 

V 

Such a result could not be finally satisfying, and 
Browning's thought fastened with increasing predilec- 
tion and exclusiveness upon one intense kind of vitality 
in which the hard antagonism of good and evil seems 
to be transcended, and that complete immersion of the 
soul in a nature not its own appears not as self-abnega- 
tion but as self-fulfilment. He did not himself use 
this phraseology about Love ; it is that of a school to 
which he, at no time, it would seem, made any con- 
scious approach. But it is clear that he found in the 
mysterious union and transfusion of diverse being which 
takes place in Love, as Hegel found in the union of 
opposites, the clue to the nature of reality, the very 
core of the heart of life. He did not talk of the union 



296 BROWNING 

of opposltes, but of "infinitude wreaking itself upon 
the finite." God himself would have been less divine, 
and so, as God, less real, had he remained aloof in 
lonely infinity instead of uniting himself with all crea- 
tion in that love which " moves the world and the 
other stars " ; the " loving worm," to quote his preg- 
nant saying once more, were diviner than a loveless 
God. We saw how his theology is double-faced be- 
tween the pantheistic yearning to find God everywhere 
and the individualist's resolute maintenance of the 
autonomy of man. God's Love, poured through the 
world, inextricably blended with all its power and 
beauty, thrilled with answering rapture by all its joy, 
and striving to clasp every human soul, provided the 
nearest approach to a solution of that conflict which 
Browning's mechanical metaphysics permitted. One 
comprehends, then, the profound significance for him 
of the actual solution apparently presented by Chris- 
tian theology. In one supreme, crucial example the 
union of God with man in consummate love had 
actually, according to Christian belief, taken place, and 
Browning probably uttered his own faith when he 
made St. John declare that 

" The acknowledgment of God in Christ 
Acknowledged by thy reason solves for thee 
All questions in the earth and out of it." * 

^ Death in the Desert. These lines, however " dramatic," mark 
with precision the extent, and the limits, of Browning's Christian 
faith. The evidence of his writings altogether confirms Mrs. Orr's 
express statement that Christ was for him, from first to last, " a 
manifestation of divine love," by human form accessible to human 
love ; but not the Redeemer of the orthodox creed. 



THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE 297 

For to acknowledge this was to recognise that love 
was divine, and that mankind at large, in virtue of 
their gift of love, shared in God's nature, finite as 
they were j that whatever clouds of intellectual illusion 
they walked in, they were lifted to a hold upon reality 
as unassailable as God's own by the least glimmer of 
love. Whatever else is obscure or elusive in Brown- 
ing, he never falters in proclaiming the absolute and 
flawless worth of love. The lover cannot, like the 
scientific investigator, miss his mark, he cannot be 
baffled or misled ; the object of his love may be un- 
worthy, or unresponsive, but in the mere act of loving 
he has his reward. 

" Knowledge means 
Ever renewed assurance by defeat 
That victory is somehow still to reach ; 
But love is victory, the prize itself." • 

This aspect of Browning's doctrine of love, though it 
inspired some of his most exalted lyrics, throws into 
naked relief the dearth of social consciousness in 
Browning's psychology. Yet it is easy to see that 
the absolute self-sufficiency into which he lifted the 
bare fact of love was one of the mainsprings of his in- 
domitable optimism. In Love was concentrated all 
that emancipates man from the stubborn continuities 
of Nature. It started up in corrupt or sordid hearts, 
and swept all their blind velleities into its purifying 
flame of passion — 

' Pillar of Sebzevir. 



298 BROWNING 

" Love is incompatible 
With falsehood, — purifies, assimilates 
All other passions to itself." ' 

And the glimmer of soul that lurked in the veriest act 
of humanity the breath of love could quicken into per- 
vading fire.^ Love was only the most intense and 
potent of those sudden accesses of vitality which are 
wont, in Browning, suddenly to break like a flame from 
the straw and dross of a brutish or sophisticated con- 
sciousness, confounding foresight and calculation, but 
giving endless stimulus to hope. Even in the contact 
with sin and sorrow Browning saw simply the touch 
of Earth from which Love, like Antaeus, sprang into 
fuller being ; they were the " dread machinery " de- 
vised to evolve man's moral qualities, " to make him 
love in turn and be beloved." ^ 

But with all its insurgent emancipating vehemence 
Love was for Browning, also, the very ground of 
stable and harmonious existence, " the energy of in- 
tegration," as Myers has finely said, " which makes a 
cosmos of the sum of things," the element of 
permanence, of law. True, its harmony was of 
the kind which admits discord and eschews routine ; 
its law that which is of eternity and not of yesterday ; 
its stability that which is only assured and fortified by 
the chivalry that plucks a Pompilia, or an Alcestis, 
from their legal doom. The true anarchist, as he 
sometimes dared to hint, was the cold unreason of 
duty which, as in Bifurcation.^ keeps lovers meant for 
each other apart. It is by love that the soul solves 

* Colo77ibe''s Birthday. 2 Fijlne. ^ The Pope. 



THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE 299 

the problem — so tragically insoluble to poor Sordello 
— of " fitting to the finite its infinity," and satisfying 
the needs of Time and Eternity at once ; ^ for Love, 
belonging equally to both spheres, can bring the pur- 
poses of body and soul into complete accord : 

" Like yonder breadth of watery heaven, a bay 
And that sky-space of water, ray for ray 
And star for star, one richness where they mixed, 
As this and that wing of an angel, fixed 
Tumultuary splendours." 

In a life thus thrilled into harmony heaven was al- 
ready realised on earth ; and Eternity itself could but 
continue what Time had begun. Death, for such a 
soul, was not an awaking, for it had not slept; nor 
an emancipation, for it was already free; nor a 
satisfying of desire, for the essence of Love was to 
want ; it was only a point at which the " last ride 
together " might pass into an eternal " riding on " — 

" With life forever old, yet new. 
Changed not in kind but in degree, 
The instant made Eternity, — 
And Heaven just prove that I and she 
Ride, ride together, forever ride ! " 



VI 

No intellectual formula, no phrase, no word, can 

express the whole purport of those intense and 

intimate fusions of sensation, passion, and thought 

which we call poetic intuition, and which all strictly 

1 Sordello, sub fin. 



300 



BROWNING 



poetic " philosophy " or " criticism of life " is an at- 
tempt to interpret and articulate. Browning was 
master of more potent weapons of the strictly intel- 
lectual kind than many poets of his rank, and his 
work is charged with convictions which bear upon 
philosophic problems and involve philosophic ideas. 
But they were neither systematic deductions from a 
speculative first principle nor fragments of tradition 
eclectically pieced together; by their very ambiguity 
and Protean many-sidedness they betrayed that, how- 
ever tinged they might be on the surface with 
speculative or traditional phrases, the nourishing roots 
sprang from the heart of joyous vitality in a primitive 
and original temperament. In Browning, if in any 
man, Joy sang that " strong music of the soul " 
which re-creates all the vitalities of the world, and 
endows us with " a new Earth and a new Heaven." 
And if joy was the root of Browning's intuition, and 
life " in widest commonalty spread " the element in 
which it moved. Love, the most intimate, intense, and 
marvellous of all vital energies, was the ideal centre 
towards which it converged. In Love, as Browning 
understood it, all those elementary joys of his found 
satisfaction. There he saw the flawless purity which 
rejoiced him in Pompilia's soul, which " would not 
take pollution, ermine-like armed from dishonour by 
its own soft snow." There he saw sudden incal- 
culableness of power abruptly shattering the con- 
tinuities of routine, throwing life instantly into a new 
perspective, and making barren trunks break into 
sudden luxuriance like the palm ; or, again, intimately 



THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE 3OI 

interpenetrating soul with soul, — " one near one is 
too far '* ; or entangling the whole creation in the in- 
extricable embrace of God. 

But if all his instincts and imaginative proclivities 
found their ideal in Love, they also insensibly im- 
pressed their own character upon his conception of it. 
The " Love '* which has so deep a significance for 
Browning is a Love steeped in the original com- 
plexion of his mind, and bearing the impress of the 
singular position which he occupies in the welter of 
nineteenth century intellectual history. His was one 
of the rare natures in which revolutionary liberalism 
and spiritual reaction, encountering in nearly equal 
strength, seem to have divided their principles and 
united their forces. Psychologically, the one had its 
strongest root in the temper which reasons, and values 
ideas ; the other in that which feels, and values emo- 
tions. Sociologically, the one stood for individualism, 
the other for solidarity. In their ultimate presup- 
positions, the one inclined to the standpoint of the 
senses and experience ; the other to a mostly vague 
and implicit idealism. In their political ideals, the 
one strove for progress, and for freedom as its condi- 
tion ; the other for order, and for active legal interven- 
tion as its safeguard. 

In two of these four points of contrast. Browning's 
temperament ranged him more or less decisively on 
the Liberal side. Individualist to the core, he was 
conspicuously deficient m the kind of social mind 
which makes a poet the voice of an organised com- 
munity, a nation, or a class. Progress, again, was 



302 BROWNING 

with him even more an instinct than a principle ; and 
he became the vates sacer of unsatisfied aspiration. 
On the other hand, that he was not without elements 
of the temper which makes for order was shown by 
his punctilious, almost eager, observance of social 
conventions, and, in the last years of his life, by the 
horror excited in him by what he took to be the an- 
archy of Women's Suffrage and Home Rule. In the 
other two fields of opposition he belonged decisively 
to the spiritual and emotional reaction. Spirit was 
for him the ultimate fact of existence, the soul and 
God were the indissoluble realities. But his idealism 
was not potent and pure enough either to control the 
realist suggestions of his strong senses and energetic 
temperament, or to interpret them in its own terms. 
And in the conflict between reason and feeling, or, as 
he put it, between " head " and " heart," as sources 
of insight, and factors in human advancement, feeling 
found its most brilliant champion in Browning, and 
its most impressive statement in his doctrine of Love. 
An utilitarian reduction of well-doing to a distribution 
of properly calculated doses of satisfaction he dis- 
missed with a scorn as derisive as Carlyle's ; "gen- 
eral utility " was a favourite of " that old stager the 
devil." ^ Yet no critic of intellect ever used intellect 
more vigorously, and no preacher of the rights of the 
heart ever dealt less in flaccid sentiment. Browning 
was Paracelsus as well as Aprile, and sharply as he 
chose to dissever " Knowledge " and " Love," Love 
was for him never a foe of intellect, but a more gifted 
* Red-Cotton Night-cap Country. 



THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE 3O3 

comrade who does the same work more effectively, 
who dives deeper, soars higher, welds more potently 
into more enduring unities, and flings upon dry hearts 
with a more infallible magic the seed of more marvel- 
lous new births. Browning as the poet of Love is 
thus the last, and assuredly not the least, in the line 
which handed on the torch of Plato. The author of 
the Phcsdrus saw in the ecstasy of Love one of the 
avenues to the knowledge of the things that indeed 
are. To Dante the supreme realities were mirrored 
in the eyes of Beatrice. For Shelley Love was inter- 
woven through all the mazes of Being ; it was the 
source of the strength by which man masters his gods. 
To all these masters of idealism Browning's vision of 
Love owed something of its intensity and of its range. 
With the ethical Love of Jesus and St. Paul his af- 
finities were more apparent, but less profound. For 
him, too, love was the sum of all morality and the 
root of all goodness. But it resembled more the joy- 
ous self-expansion of the Greek than the humility and 
self-abnegation of Christian love. Not the saintly 
ascetic nor the doer of good works, but the artist and 
the " lover," dominated his imagination when he wrote 
of Love ; imbuing even God's love for the world 
with the joy of creation and the rapture of embrace. 
Aprile's infinite love for things impelled him to body 
them visibly forth. Deeper in Browning than his 
Christianity, and prior to it, lay his sense of immeas- 
urable worth in all life, the poet's passion for being. 

Browning's poetry is thus one of the most potent 
of the influences which in the nineteenth century 



304 BROWNING 

helped to break down the shallow and mischievous 
distinction between the " sacred " and the "• secular," 
and to set in its place the profounder division between 
man enslaved by apathy, routine, and mechanical 
morality, and man lifted by the law of love into a 
service which is perfect freedom, into an approxima- 
tion to God which is only the fullest realisation of 
humanity. 



INDEX 



NoTB. — The names of Persons are given in small capitals ; titles of literary 
works in italics ; other names in ordinary type ; black figures indicate the 
more detailed references. Only the more important of the incidental quota- 
tions are included. Poems are referred to only under their authors' names. 



^SCHYLUS, 213. 

Allingham, W., 86. 
American fame of Browning, 87. 
Aristophanes, 77, 205 f. 
Arnold, M., 27. 
Asolo, 28, 50, 2 1 8, 229. 
AthencBum, The, 171, 248. 

Balzac, 42, 50, 85, 115. 

Barrett, Elizabeth. See 
Browning, E, B. 

Bartoli, his Simboli, 28. 

Benckhausen, Russian Con- 
sul-General, 15. 

Beranger, 85. 

Blagden, Isa. See Brown- 
ing, R., letters. 

Bronson, Mrs. Arthur, 218, 
229. 

Bronte, Emily, her character, 
« Heathchff," 65. 

Browning, Robert (grand- 
father), 4. 

Browning, Robert (father), 4, 
8, 19, 148 n., 171. 

Browning, Robert, cosmopol- 
itan in sympathies, English 
by his art, 3, 4 ; his birth, 5 ; 
likeness to his mother, 6 n. ; 
character of his home, 6 ; 
boyhood, 7, 8 ; early sense of 
rhythm, 8 ; reads Shelley, 
Keats, and Byron, 10 f. ; 
journey to St. Petersburg, 
15 f. ; first voyage to Italy, 
27 f. ; second voyage to Italy, 



61 ; correspondence with E. 
B. Barrett, 78 ; marriage, 80 ; 
settlement in Italy, 83 ; 
friendships and society at 
Florence, 84 f.; Italian pol- 
itics, 84f., Italian scenery, 91 ; 
Italian painting, 97 f., and 
music, 102 f. ; religion, I09f., 
his interpretation of In a 
Balcony, 144 n. ; death of 
Mrs. Browning, 146; return 
to London, 147 ; society, 
149 ; summer sojourns in 
France, 152 f., 201 f. ; in the 
Alps, 214; death of Miss 
Egerton-Smith, 214; Italy 
once more, 218; Asolo and 
Venice, 229 f. ; death, 231. 



Works — 
Abt Vogler, 70, 157 f. 
Agamemnon (translation of), 

213 f. 
Andrea del Sarto, 70, 99 f. 
Another Way of Love, 140. 
Any Wife to Any Husband^ 138. 
Appearances, 210. 
Aristophanes* Apology, 204 f. 
Artemis Prologizes, 67, 189. 
Asolando, 2x8, 229 f. 
At the Mermaid, 209. 
Bad Dreams, 229. 
Balaustioit's Adventure ^ 75, 

189. 
Baldinucci, 212. 



305 



3o6 



INDEX 



Bells and Pomegranates ^ 17, 

41 f., 74. 
Bifurcation, 211. 
Bishop of St. Fraxed^s, The, 

70, 112, 271. 
Blot in the ^Scutcheon, A., 52 f. 
Blotigram^s Apology, 16, 57, 

60, 89, 112, 128 f., 274 f. 
Boy and the Angel, The, 1 1 2, 

"5- 

By the Fireside, 93, 133 f., 271. 

Caliban upon Setebos, 160 f. 
Cavalier Ttines, 66. 
■ Childe Roland, 94 f., 260 f. 
Christmas- Eve and Easter- Day, 

80, 112 f., 161. 
Cleon, 113, 124 f. 
Clive, 220. 

Colombe's Birthday^ 53, 56 f. 
Confessiofial, The, 41, 66. 
Cristina, 49, 68 f. 
Deaf and Diivib, 290. 
Death in the Desert, A., 15 1, 
«* 158 f. 
De Gustibus, 89 f., 91, 252. 
Dis Aliter Vistun, 151, 155. 
Dratnas, 38 f. 
Dratfiatic Idylls, 219 f. 
Dramatic Lyrics, 39 f., 65 f., 

78 f. 
Dramatic Romances, 39, 78 f. 
Dramatis Persona:, 150-167, 211. 
Echetlos, 220. 

Englishman in Italy, The, 92. 
Epilogue to Dra?natis Personcz, 

153, 166 f., 291. 
Epistle of Karshish, An, 112, 

122 f. 
Fury dice to Orpheus, 156. 
Evelyn Hope, 136, 287. 
Pears and Scruples, 210. 
Ferishtah^s Fancies, TLk f. 
Fifine at the Pair, 92, 148, 

195 f., 207, 240. 
Flight of the Duchess, The, 

68 f., 197. 
Flower'' s Name, The, 67. 
Forgiveness, A, 21 1, 
Fra Lippo Lippi, 70, 100 f., 1 1 1. 



Francis Furini, 294. 
Gerard de Lair esse, 219 f. 
Gismond, 42, 57, 67. 
(7/^^, The, 68 f., 69. 
Gratnmarian''s Funeral, The, 

109 f. 
Gtiardian Angel, The, 98. 
Halbert and Hob, 219. 
Helenas Tower, sonnet, 187. 
Heretic'' s Tragedy, A, I26f., 

260. 
Herve Riel, 188 f., 220. 
Z^c/y Cross Day, 5 n., 126. 
Hot7ie Thoughts from Abroad 

(quoted), 262. 
Hotne Thoughts from the Sea, 

27. 
House, 209. 
How it Strikes a Contemporary^ 

107 f. 
How they brought the Good 

News from Ghent to Aix, 

27 f., 67, 220, 
Hugues of Sax e Gotha, Master, 

70, 104 f., III. 
In a Balcony, 141 f. 
In a Gondola, 67. 
In a Year, 138. 
Incondita, 10. 

Inn Album, The, 187, 206 f. 
Instans Tyrajinus, 66, 90. 
In Three Days, 135, 139. 
Italian in England, The, 90. 
Ivan Ivanovitch, 16, 219, 221. 
Ixion, 223 f. 

James Lee^s VVife^ I50f. 
jfochanan Halkadosh, 222. 
Jocoseria, 212 f. 
Johannes Agricola, 18. 
King Victor and King Charles, 

16, 45, 50. 
Laboratory, The, 39, 66. 
Zrt: Saisiaz, 214 f. 
Zaj/ /vzV/^ Together, The, 68, 

136 f., 299. 
Zz/^ eV? a Love, 135. 
Light Woman, A, 140. 
Z(?j/ Leader, The, 65. 
ZfJi'/ Mistress, The, 68, 154. 



INDEX 



307 



Love in a Life, 135. 
Luria, 60, 61 f. 
A'ladhouse Cells y 17. 
Martin Relph, 219 f., 272. 
Men and Women, 26, 60, 72, 

74, 86-146, 151, 211. 
Aluleykeh, 221. 

My Last Duchess, 66, 70, 21 1. 
i]/}/ ■S'/czr, 139. 
Natural Magic, 21 r. 
Ned Bratts, 219. 
Never the Time and the Place, 

223. 
Now, 230. 
Nump/ioleptos, 21 1. 
0/.2!' Pictures in Florence, 90, 

10 1 f. 
0«<? A^(rj/ of Love, 136. 
C>«^ Word More, 97 f., 144 f. 
Pacchiarotto, 108, 1 61, 187, 

208 f. 
/lz« a«rt^ Luna, 245. 
Paracelsus, 18 f., 26, 29, 39, 43. 
Parleyings with Certain People 

of Importance, 226 f. 
Patriot, The, 90. 
Pauline, 12 f. 
Pearl, a Girl, A, 230. 
Pheidippides, 220. 
Pic tor Ignotus, 70 f. 
/'zV^ Piper, The, 70 f., 266. 
/'z/^/rtr Passes, SO f., 59, 79, 90 

150, 179 f. 
Popularity, 108. 
Porphyria^ s Lover, 17. 
Pretty Woman, A, 140. 
Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, 

16, 193 f. 
Pros pice, 108, 156. 
Rabbi ben Ezra, 5 n., 108, 

156 f. 
Red-cotton Night-cap Country, 

89 (Miranda), 187, 201 f. 
Return of the Druses, The, 45, 

47, 64. 
Reverie, 230. 
i'v'm^'- rt';?a' z'/;^ Book, The, 1 50 f., 

168-185, 273 f. 
i?«^<?/, 68. 



^Ijzzw/ Martin's Su?}imer, 211. 
^az//, 49, 71 f., 112, 120 f. 

Serenade at the Villa, 135. 

Shelley, Essay on, 21, 105 f., 
108 f. 

Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis, 
66, 79. 

Sludge, Mr., the Medium, 89, 
163 f. 

Solomon and Balkis, 222. 

Sordello, 16, 25 f., 236. 

SouPs Tragedy, A, 59 f. 

Spanish Cloister, The, 79. 

Statue and the Bust, The, 140, 
211. 

Strafford, 16, 26, 43 f. 

Su/fimuf/i Bojium, 230. 

Timers Revenges, 66. 

Toccata of Galuppi's, A, 103 f., 
152. 

7(?o Za/"^, 151. 

Transcendentalistn, 107. 

Tzf m //z^ Campagna, 92, 132 f., 
138, 236. 

Two /bi?/^ of Croisic, The, 216 f. 

Woman's Last Word, A, 138. 

Women and Roses, 141. 

Worst of It, The, 155. 

Youth and Art, 151, 155. 

Letters, to E. B. B., 6 n., 8, 9, 
49, 59 n., 62, 63, 65, 67, 72, 
75, 78-^3 /^"^^''^^ 85, ii3f., 
239, 249 f., 280; to Miss 
Blagden, 152, 170, 172 n., 
247 ; to Miss Flower, 44 ; to 
Miss Haworth, 27 n., 45, 
235 ; to Ruskin, 235 ; to 
Aubrey de Vere, 245 n. 

Browning, Elizabeth Bar- 
rett MouLTON - Barrett 
(wife). First allusion to 
Browning, 75 ; reads Para- 
celsus, 75 n. ; her character, 
early life and poetry, 76 f. ; 
correspondence with Brown- 
ing, 78 f. ; marriage, 81 ; set- 
tlement in Italy, 84 ; friend- 
ships, society at Florence, 




■■■ 3o8 



INDEX 



84 f. ; death, 145 f. ; her re- 
lation to Pompilia, 178. 
Aurora Leigh, 80, 86, 150, 

208. 
Songs before Congress, 90. 
Sonnets from the Portu- 
guese, 86. 
Casa Guidi Windows, 90. 
Letters to R. B., 49, 65, 
77 n., 'jZ-%'^ passi7n, 113, 
249. 
Letter to Ruskin, 77 n. 
Letters to others, 85, 89, 
92 f., 98, 242. 
Browning, Sarah Anna 

(mother), 5. 
Burns, R., 40, 278. 
Byron, Lord, gf., 103, 196, 
216, 260. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 37, 42, 86, 

149, 171, 228, 254, 302. 
Carnival, Schumann's, 200. 
Casa Guidi, 84, 96. 
Cellini, Benvenuto, 98. 
Chaucer, G., 41. 
Coleridge, S. T., 9, 94, 133. 
CoRNARO, Catharine, 50. 
Cornhill Magazine, The, 188, 

Dante, 30 f., 34, 36, 65, 119 f., 

Dickens, Charles, 42, 50. 
Domett, Alfred (referred to), 

99. 
Donne, John, 8, 251 n, 
Dulwich, 7, 49, 96. 

Egerton-Smith, Ann, 214. 
Emerson, R. W., 254. 
Euripides, 172 n., 189, 206. 

Fano, the Brownings at, 98. 
Faucit, Helen (Lady Martin), 

43- 
Fichte, J. E., 284. 

FitzGerald, Edward, 171, 

186. 

Florence, 83 f. passim. 



Flower, Eliza, 12, 44. 
Forster, John, 43. 
Fox, W. J., 10, 15, 43, 86. 

Germany. German strain in 
Browning, 6 n. 

Giotto, 98, 102. 

Goethe, J. W. von, 7, 284; 
Faust, 20, 32, 51, 197, 291 ; 
Iphigenie, 31 n. ; Metamor- 
phose der PJlanzen, 262 ; 
Ta s s 0, 31; Westostlicher 
Divan, 224. 

Greek, early studies in, 9. 

Gressoney, 224. 

Haworth, Euphrasia Fanny, 

27 f. 
HoRNE, author of Orion, 80. 
Hugo, Victor, 85, 240. 

Ibsen, H., The Wild Duck, e^g. 

Jameson, Anna, 84. 
Jews. Browning's attitude to- 
wards the Jewish race, 5 n. 
JONSON, Ben, 39, 212. 
Junius, Letters of, 8. 

Keats, J., 10 f., 72 f., 239 f„ 

251. 
Ken yon, John, 72, 77 f., 80, 

82, 86. 

Landor, W. S., 31 n., 41 f., 

87, 96, 226 f. 
Leighton, Sir Frederic, 71, 

149. 
Lucca, the Brownings at, 92. 

Maclise, 67. 
Macready, 43, 52. 
Maeterlinck, M., 142, 161 n. 
Malory, 104. 
Meredith, Mr. G., 166. 
Metres, Browning's, 184, 251, 

258. 
Michelangelo, 102. 
Mill, John Stuart, 13. 



INDEX 



309 



Mils AND, Joseph, 85 f., 188, 

201, 227. 
Milton, J., 71, 258. 
Monthly Repository , 1 5. 
MoxoN, Edward, publisher, 

59 n- 
MussET, Alfred de, 139 f. 

Napoleon III, Emperor, 88 f., 
193- 

OSSIAN, 8. 

Palestrina, 102. 
Paris, 85 f., 91, 105, 202. 
Paul, Saint, 303. \ 
Phelps, actor, 58. 
Pisa, 83. 

Plato, 14, 237, 302. 
Prinsep, v., 149. 

QuARLES, Francis, 8. 

Rezzonico Palace, 229. 
Ripert-Monclar, C o m t e 

AMfeDEE de, 18. 

Rome, the Brownings in, 86 f. 
Rosetti, D. G., 15, 86, 149. 
Rossetti, Mr. W. M., 170 n. 
RusKiN, John, 77 n., 149, 235. 

Sand, George, 85. 
Schiller, F., 69, 207. 
Scott, Sir W., 93. 
Shakespeare, W,, 65, 198, 

209 ; jRofueo and Juliet, 39 ; 

The Tempest, 51, 161 f. ; 

Lovers Labour'' s Lost, 56 ; 

Hamlet y 58 ; Julius Cczsar, 



63 ; Othello, 62 ; As You 

Like It, 94. 
Shelley, P. B., 10, 11, 14, 21, 

34, 89, 109, 181, 236, 237 f., 

252, 255, 260, 268, 291. 
Smart, Christopher, his 

Song to David, 7 1 

SOUTHEY, R., 9. 

Spiritualism, 87. 
Swinburne, Mr. A, C, 150. 

Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 3, 

20, 32, 86 f., 128, 149, 171, 

174, 258 f. 
Tennyson, Frederick, 149. 
Thackeray, Annie (Mrs, 

Ritchie), 201. 
Thackeray, W, M., 149. 
Tittle, Margaret, the poet's 

grandmother, 4. 
Trelawney, E. J., 61. 
Trijler, The, 16. 

Venice, 28, 38. 
Verdi, 102. 
Villon, 104. 
Virgil, Dante's, 30. 
Vocabulary, Browning's, 259. 
Voltaire, 8.*^j 

"Walpole, Horace, 8. 
Wiedemann, William, the 

poet's maternal grandfather, 5. 
Wiseman, Cardinal, 129. 
Woolner, 149. 
Wordsworth, 9, 33, 92 f., 241, 

261, 265, 270, 280. 

York (a horse), 27. 



THE END 



6 



